Hannah Wilke

American artist

Hannah Wilke (born Arlene Hannah Butter; (March 7, 1940 – January 28, 1993) was an American painter, sculptor, photographer, video artist and performance artist. Wilke's work is known for exploring issues of feminism, sexuality and femininity.

Hannah Wilke was born on March 7, 1940, in New York City to Jewish parents; her grandparents were Eastern European immigrants. She graduated from Great Neck North High School, on Long Island, in 1957. In 1962, she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Science in Education from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia. She taught art in several high schools for approximately 30 years and joined the faculty of the School of Visual Arts. After her graduation the same year she taught art at two high schools. First, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania (1961 1965), between 1965 and 1970 she worked in White Plains, New York. After leaving White Plains, she joined the School of Visual Arts, in New York (1972 1991). From 1969 to 1977, Wilke was in a relationship with the American Pop artist Claes Oldenburg; they lived, worked and traveled together during that time. Wilke's work was exhibited nationally and internationally throughout her life and continues to be shown posthumously. Solo exhibitions of her work were first mounted in New York and Los Angeles in 1972. Her first full museum exhibition was held at the University of California, Irvine, in 1976, and her first retrospective at the University of Missouri in 1989. Posthumous retrospectives were held in Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Malmö, Sweden in 2000 and at the Neuberger Museum of Art from 2008 to 2009. Since her death, Wilke's work has been shown in solo gallery shows, group exhibitions, and several surveys of women's art, including WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Elles at the Centre Georges Pompidou, and Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947 – 2016 at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles. The Hannah Wilke Collection and Archive, Los Angeles was founded in 1999 by Hannah Wilke's sister Marsie Scharlatt and her family, and has been represented by Alison Jacques Gallery, London since 2009. Her image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.

Wilke first gained renown with her "vulval" terra cotta sculptures in the 1960s. Her sculptures, first exhibited in New York in the late 1960s, are often mentioned as some of the first explicit vaginal imagery arising from the women's liberation movement, Some of her mediums included clay, chewing gum, kneaded erasers, laundry lint and latex. Furthermore, Wilke reported that the reason she chose chewing gum was because ″it's the perfect metaphor for the American women—chew her up, get what you want out of her, throw her out and pop in a new piece.″ Wilke's sculptures were an innovative example of eroticism using a style that combined post minimalism and feminist aesthetics. A consummate draftswoman, Wilke created numerous drawings, beginning in the early 1960s and continuing throughout her life. In a review of Wilke's drawings at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in 2010, Thomas Micchelli wrote in The Brooklyn Rail, "At her core, she was a maker of things an artist whose sensuality and humor are matched by her formal acumen and tactile rigor." She performed live and videotaped performance art, beginning in 1974 with Hannah Wilke Super t Art, a live performance at the Kitchen, New York, which she also made into an iconic photographic work. Wilke's performances evoke the likes of Simone Forti, Trisha Brown, and Yvonne Rainer. The sculptural art Wilke created, with its unconventional materials and feminist narratives also relates to the work of Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alina Szapocznikow, and Niki de St Phalle.

In 1974, Wilke began work on her photographic body art piece S. O. S — Starification Object Series, in which she merged her minimalist sculpture and her own body by creating tiny vulval sculptures out of chewing gum and sticking them to herself. The 50 self portraits were originally created as a game, "S. O. S. Starificaion Object Series: An Adult Game of Mastication", 1974–75, which Wilke made into an installation that is now in the Centre Pompidou, Paris. She also performed this piece publicly in Paris in 1975, having audience members chew the gum for her before she sculpted them and placed them on papers that she hung on the wall. Wilke's use of vaginas and vulvas refer to her idea of ″natural womanhood″, in order to support her argument that women are biologically superior. Besides Hannah Wilke Super t Art, 1974, other well known performances in which Wilke used her body include Gestures, 1974; Hello Boys, 1975; Intercourse with (audio installation) 1974–1976; Intercourse with (video) 1976; and Hannah Wilke Through the Large Glass performed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1977.

Hannah Wilke died in Houston, Texas, in 1993 from lymphoma. Her last work, Intra Venus (1992–1993), is a posthumously published photographic record of her physical transformation and deterioration resulting from chemotherapy and bone marrow transplant. The photographs, which were taken by her husband Donald Goddard whom she had lived with since 1982 and married in 1992 shortly before her death, confront the viewer with personal images of Wilke progressing from midlife happiness to bald, damaged, and resigned. Intra Venus was exhibited and published posthumously partially in response to Wilke's feelings that clinical procedures hide patients as if dying were a "personal shame". The Intra Venus works also include watercolor Face and Hand drawings, Brushstrokes, a series of drawings made from her own hair and the Intra Venus Tapes, a 16 channel videotape installation.

Wilke often features herself as a posing glamour model. Her use of self in photography and performance art, however, has been interpreted as a celebration and validation of Self, Women, the Feminine, and Feminism. Conversely, it has also been described as an artistic deconstruction of cultural modes of female vanity, narcissism, and beauty. Wilke referred to herself as a feminist artist from the beginning. The art critic Ann Sargent Wooster said that Wilke's identification with the feminist movement was confusing because of her beauty — her self portraitures looked more like a Playboy centerfold than the typical feminist nudes. Wilke once answered the critics who commented on her body being too beautiful for her work by saying "People give me this bullshit of, 'What would you have done if you weren't so gorgeous?' What difference does it make? Gorgeous people die as do the stereotypical 'ugly.' Everybody dies."

During her lifetime, Wilke was widely exhibited and received critical praise while also being viewed as controversial. However, until recently, museums were hesitant to acquire work by women artists who, including Wilke, engaged in protests decrying their lack of inclusion during the feminist movement of the 1970s. While still alive, Wilke's work was in a few permanent collections, showcasing the confrontational use of the female sexuality. Since her death, Wilke's work has been acquired for the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and in European museums such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris.