Art & Art History
Hannah Wilke: Works from 1965–92
Hannah Wilke, a painter, sculptor, photographer, video maker, and performance artist, was a key figure in the American feminist art movement. Her applications of self-portraiture and vulval imagery in her works are powerful reexaminations of the male gaze, traditionally phallic sculptures, and culturally accepted ideas and ideals of feminine beauty. Born Arlene Hannah Butter in 1940 to a Jewish family in New York City, Wilke attended public school in Queens before continuing on to study art at Stella Elkins Tyler School of Fine Art, Temple University, Philadelphia. Throughout her career she taught art, and in 1972 she joined the faculty at the School of Visual Art in New York City.
Wilke first gained recognition for her terracotta sculptures of vulvas exhibited in New York in the 1960s, which cemented her status as one of the most important feminist and conceptual artists of the period. Alternately accused of narcissism and of playing into societal standards of beauty and female objectification by using her own conventionally beautiful body as the subject and object of much of her work, Wilke used her practice to take control of her own body’s erotic potential. Later, while undergoing treatment for the cancer that would eventually kill her, Wilke took similarly powerful ownership of her body’s own breakdown. The resulting work, Intra-Venus (1994) documented her body’s response to chemotherapy with the same fiercely confrontational attitude with which she had previously approached feminine sexuality. Intra-Venus eerily mirrors the artist’s earlier series Portrait of the Artist with Her Mother, Selma Butter, which contrasts Wilke’s young, strong body with her mother’s withered torso, scarred from a mastectomy.
Prior to her premature death from lymphoma in 1996, Wilke created some of the most striking and influential artworks of the 20th century. Hannah Wilke: Works from 1965–92, her posthumous retrospective at Gallery 400, contains twelve works spanning the course of her artistic career. Displayed works include I Object: Memoirs of a Sugargiver, in which Wilke confrontationally mimicked Marcel Duchamp’s Etant Donnés, replacing the anonymous nude female with her own naked form. (The title is also a reference to Duchamp, who sometimes referred to himself as Merchand du Sel, or salt seller.) Masticated Box Sculpture, from the series S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1975), is part of a body of work Wilke made using pieces of chewed gum fashioned into small, elegant vulvas. Wilke affixed these chewing gum sculptures to her body, transforming them into small, puckered wounds, and then had herself photographed. In Masticated Box Sculpture, the “cunt/scar” forms, as Wilke called them, are displayed mounted on paper, in grids of sixteen pages on each panel. The exhibition of her work at Gallery 400 makes these canonical works available to a Chicago audience.
EXHIBITION CHECKLIST
Hannah Wilke
Advertisements for Living (series of 9), 1966–84
Cibachrome, each 28 x 81 in.
© Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
B.C. June 15, from the series B.C. (before cancer), 1989
Watercolor on paper, 71 1/2 x 51 1/2 in.
© Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Daughters, 1975–82
Black-and-white photographs, 28 x 64 in.
© Donald Goddard
Gestures, 1974–76
Black-and-white photographs, triptych; photographs, each 5 x 7 in.; frames, each 40 x 30 in.
© Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Intra-Venus #8, 1992
Chromagenic supergloss print, 71 1/2 x 51 1/2 in.
© Donald Goddard
I OBJECT: Memoirs of a Sugargiver, 1977–78
Cibachrome diptych, each 16 x 14 in.
© Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Mastication Box Sculpture #1 and #2, 1975
Chewing gum on paper (16 panels included), each 33 3/4 x 26 1/4 in.
© Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Portrait of the Artist with Her Mother, Selma Butter, 1978–81
Cibachrome diptych, each 30 x 40 in.
© Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
That Fills Earthen . . . , 1965
Terracotta, 9 1/4 x 8 1/2 x 8 1/2 in.
© Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Tree of Life: Red, Yellow & Blue, 1992
Computer-generated photographs (set of 3), 14 x 38 3/4 in.
© Donald Goddard
MEDIA COVERAGE
Camper, Fred. “Multiple Exposures.” Chicago Reader, Sept. 6, 1996, p. 30.
Hixson, Kathryn. “Hannah Wilke.” New Art Examiner, Nov. 1996, p. 30.
Postcard: Hannah Wilke: Works from 1965–92
EXHIBITION SUPPORT
This exhibition is made possible by the School of Art and Design, the College of Architecture and the Arts, and supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and through generous support from the Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Hannah Wilke (1940–1993), the pioneering feminist conceptual artist, worked in sculpture, drawing, assemblage, photography, performance, and installation. Her work addresses issues of gender, illness, and representation and the construction of the self. The work not only challenges prevailing visual conventions of the female body, but also addresses, to different degrees, the way perceptions of disease and aging, and the symbolic fragmentation of the female body, affects identity. With an aggressive feminism, Wilke exposed herself in and as her art. Since her first one-person exhibition in 1972 she has been represented by the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Jewish Museum, both in New York; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, and the Milwaukee Art Museum among other institutions. She earned a BFA and a BS in education from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1962, and taught sculpture at the School of the Visual Arts in New York for many years. She died of complications from lymphoma at age 52.