Visiting hours under the covers (2025) is a new performance where artist MG Bernard (she/they/ugh) invites audience members to climb into bed with her and do...whatever they want. Instead of a doctor or nurse, the artist asks participants to play a temporary "care partner" role while visiting them under the covers in a hospital bed. Via this experimental and participatory performance, she asks "How have my early experiences of being 'touched' by medical professionals impacted the way I experience bodily intimacy today? Can my bodymind learn/relearn/unlearn how to distinguish between 'clinical contact' and physical intimacy that can be pleasurable?" Bernard hopes to discover new and unfamiliar relationships, narratives, and movements with each one-on-one interaction.

Mary Grace Bernard (MG, she/they/ugh) is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, advocate, & crip witch. Her practice finds itself at the intersection of performance art, transmedia installation art, art scholarship, art writing, curation, & activism. Exploring seemingly separate fields like the material & immaterial realities of disability, the living dead, queerness, cyborgism, crip time, post-humanness, spirituality, madness, care, dependency, & the boundaries between the personal & political spheres of existence, they seek to dissolve binary thinking while converging otherwise invisible communities & their stories.

Bernard’s work is conceptual, personal, socially engaged, deeply researched, & contemplative. From staged photography to found-object sculpture, digital video to curation, performance to art writing, ugh chooses media per its ability to communicate directly with her audiences. Through her transmedia artworks, they turn art visitors into active, empathetic spectators of her painful & time-consuming care routines. Bernard’s work pulls from various historical contexts to reimagine traditional narratives for a more equitable future.

MG Bernard’s performance is part of Performance Art Week XIII. For more information, click here.