Mary Coble embodies body art better than body art has ever been embodied before.

She has taken the work of other famous body artists like Marina Abramovic and Yoko Ono a step further by dedicating herself completely to the LGBTQ community. And trust me, you don’t know dedication until you have witnessed the work of Mary Coble.

I’ll paint the picture for you. Mary Coble is sitting in a sort of dentist’s chair looking at pictures of sexy ladies and getting the shit shocked out of her. “Why?” you ask. Well, because some people actually believe that they could simply “shock the gay away,” -- a fact that Coble wanted to bring out in the open. In another performance piece, Coble tattooed the names of men and women who were murdered because they were queer onto her body. She also tattooed across the front of her body every derogatory remark you could possibly make. She purposefully did these in beautiful script because she wanted to “set up a dichotomy between the ‘beautiful’ visual of the text and the nasty meaning behind the word.” She didn’t use ink so there was no lasting trace on her body after these performances but still endured being tattooed for 11 hours straight. It’s hard to imagine that the mantra “mind over matter” would work for 11 hours but apparently she has a super-human pain tolerance.

Her artistic training didn’t exactly set her up for this either. She focused on fine art photography until she realized that it didn’t jive with her style. Performance was just more raw. And effective, too. Coble has not only raised awareness of the suffering of the LGBTQ community in and out of the art world but she has also proved that she is the baddest of badasses in the game. Despite my squeamishness, I am super excited to see what she comes up with next.