Hannah Wilke
Hannah Wilke | |
---|---|
Houston, Texas | |
Nationality | American |
Education | Stella Elkins Tyler School of Fine Art, Temple U, Philadelphia |
Known for | Sculpture, photography, body art, video art |
Notable work | S.O.S. — Starification Object Series (1974) Intra-Venus (1992–1993) |
Awards | NEA Grants in sculpture and performance, Guggenheim Grant for sculpture |
Hannah Wilke (born Arlene Hannah Butter; (March 7, 1940 – January 28, 1993)
Biography
Hannah Wilke was born on March 7, 1940, in
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.[5][6][7] Wilke's work was exhibited[8] nationally and internationally throughout her life and continues to be shown posthumously.[9] 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
The Hannah Wilke Collection and Archive, Los Angeles was founded in 1999 by Hannah Wilke's sister Marsie Scharlatt and her family,
Her image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.[14]
Early work
Wilke first gained renown with her "
Body art
In 1974, Wilke began work on her photographic
Wilke coined the term "performalist self-portraits" to credit photographers who assisted her, including her father (First Performalist Self-Portrait, 1942–77) and her sister, Marsie (Butter) Scharlatt (Arlene Hannah Butter and Cover of Appearances, 1954–77). The title of Wilke's photographic and performance work, So Help Me Hannah, 1979, was taken from a vernacular phrase from the 1930s and '40s and has been interpreted as playing off of the
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.
Death and Intra-Venus
Hannah Wilke died in Houston, Texas, in 1993 from lymphoma.[1][24] 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.[25] 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.[25] Intra-Venus mirrors her photo diptych Portrait of the Artist with Her Mother, Selma Butter, 1978–82, which portrayed her mother's struggles with breast cancer and "having literally incorporated her mother, illness and all."[26] 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".[27]
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.[28]
Pose and narcissism
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.[29][30] Conversely, it has also been described as an artistic deconstruction of cultural modes of female vanity, narcissism, and beauty.[31][32]
Wilke referred to herself as a feminist artist from the beginning.[33] 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.[33] According to Wooster,
The problem Wilke faced in being taken seriously is that she was conventionally beautiful and her beauty and self-absorbed narcissism distracted you from her reversal of the voyeurism inherent in women as sex objects. In her photographs of herself as a goddess, a living incarnation of great works of art or as a pin-up, she wrested the means of production of the female image from male hands and put them in her own.[33]
If critics found Wilke's beauty an impediment to understanding her work, this changed in the early 1990s when Wilke began documenting the decay of her body ravaged by lymphoma. Wilke's use of self-portraiture has been explored in detail in writing about her last photographic series, Intra Venus.[34]
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.[35]"
Critical recognition
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.
Solo exhibitions
- 1976, Fine Arts Gallery, University of California, Irvine
- 1978, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York
- 1979, Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, DC
- 1989, Gallery 210, University of Missouri, St Louis
- 1998, Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective, Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center, Copenhagen (traveling exhibition)[38]
- 2000, Uninterrupted Career: Hannah Wilke 1940–1993, Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin[2]
- 2006, Exchange Values, Artium- Centro Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporaneo, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain[39]
- 2008, Hannah Wilke: Gestures, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York[40]
- 2021, Hannah Wilke: Art for Life’s Sake, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis [41]
Awards
She received a Creative Artists Public Service Grant (1973); National Endowment for the Arts Grants (1987, 1980, 1979, 1976); Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grants (1992, 1987); a Guggenheim Fellowship (1982), and an International Association of Art Critics Award (1993).
Collections
Wilke's work is held in the following permanent collections:
- Brooklyn Museum[42]
- Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY[43]
- Des Moines Art Center[44]
- Tate, U.K.[45]
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art[46]
- Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain[47]
- Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, MN[48]
- Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT[49]
- Jewish Museum, New York, NY[50]
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY[51]
- Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY[52]
- Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY[53]
- Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, OH[54]
- Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France[55]
- Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ[56]
- David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, RI[57]
- Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV[58]
- Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA[2]
- University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI[59]
References
- ^ a b Smith, Roberta (1994-01-30). "ART VIEW; An Artist's Chronicle Of a Death Foretold". The New York Times. Retrieved 2007-06-28.
- ^ a b c d e "Hannah Wilke". Oxford Art Online.[dead link]
- ^ "Ancestry Library Edition".
- ^ "The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation".
- ^ Marsie Scharlatt, "Hannah in California," in Hannah Wilke: Selected Work, 1963-1992, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles, and SolwayJones, Los Angeles, 2004.
- ^ Tracy Fitzpatrick, "Making Myself into a Monument," Gestures, Neuberger Museum of Art, 2009
- ^ Nancy Princenthal, Hannah Wilke, Prestel Publishing, 2010
- ^ a b "Hannah Wilke: Biography, Exhibitions, Awards, HWCALA". Archived from the original on May 28, 2008. Retrieved December 18, 2010.
- ^ "EXHIBITIONS". Archived from the original on January 25, 2011. Retrieved December 18, 2010.
- ^ "WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution". The Museum of Contemporary Art. Retrieved 2019-04-25.
- ^ "Exhibitions — Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947 – 2016 - Louise Bourgeois, Isa Genzken, Phyllida Barlow, Anna Maria Maiolino, Lygia Pape, Eva Hesse, Mira Schendel, Rachel Khedoori - Hauser & Wirth". www.hauserwirth.com. Retrieved 2019-04-25.
- ^ "Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles". HANNAH WILKE COLLECTION & ARCHIVE, LOS ANGELES. Retrieved April 30, 2019.
- ^ "Hannah Wilke". Alison Jacques Gallery. Archived from the original on April 17, 2019. Retrieved April 30, 2019.
- ^ "Some Living American Women Artists/Last Supper". Smithsonian American Art Museum. Retrieved 21 January 2022.
- ^ ISBN 0-8223-3746-0.
- ^ Tracy Fitzpatrick, Gestures, Neuberger Museum of Art, 2009
- ^ Schapiro, Miriam (1977–78). "Waste Not Want Not". Heresies 1 (4): 153.
- ^ a b "Hannah Wilke Used Her Body as a Canvas to Subvert the Patriarchy". January 2019.
- ProQuest 1710658672.
- ^ Micchelli, Thomas (October 2010). "HANNAH WILKE Early Drawings". The Brooklyn Rail.
- ^ JSTOR 777953.
- X-TRA. 6 (4). Archived from the originalon 2011-07-21. Retrieved 2007-07-07.
- ^ Princenthal, Nancy (February 1997). "Mirror of Venus — photography, videos and performance art, Hannah Wilke, Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York, New York". Art in America. 85 (2): 92–93. Archived from the original on 2007-12-16. Retrieved 2007-07-07.
- ^ "Hannah Wilke". Guggenheim. Retrieved 2018-12-21.
- ^ JSTOR 3245813.
- ISBN 0-8166-2773-8.
- ^ Vine, Richard (May 1994). "Hannah Wilke at Ronald Feldman — New York, New York — Review of Exhibitions". Art in America. Archived from the original on 2007-10-28. Retrieved 2007-07-07.
- ^ "Hannah Wilke Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works". The Art Story. Retrieved 2018-03-12.
- ^ Joanna Frueh, "Hannah Wilke," in Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective, University of Missouri Press, 1989.
- ^ Arlene Raven,"The Eternal Hannah Wilke," in Hannah Wilke: Selected Works, 1963-1992, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles and SolwayJones, Los Angeles
- JSTOR 3245676.
- ^ Jones (1998), pp.151-152.
- ^ a b c Wooster, Ann-Sargent (Fall 1990). "Hannah Wilke: Whose Image is it anyway". High Performance.
- ^ Amelia Jones, "Hannah Wilke's Feminist Narcissism," Intra Venus, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, 1994.
- ^ "Everybody Dies ... Even the Gorgeous: Resurrecting the Work of Hannah Wilke" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-07-05.
- ^ Nancy Princenthal, Hannah Wilke, Prestel, 2010
- ^ "Hannah Wilke Art in Selected Public Collections".
- ^ "Hannah Wilke (retrospective) | www.nikolajkunsthal.dk". www.nikolajkunsthal.dk. Archived from the original on 2018-03-12. Retrieved 2018-03-11.
- ^ "Hannah Wilke. Exchange Values". www.artium.eus (in European Spanish). Retrieved 2019-07-31.
- ^ "Hannah Wilke: Gestures". Neuberger Museum of Art. Retrieved 2019-07-31.
- ^ "Hannah Wilke: Art for Life's Sake". pulitzerrarts.org. Retrieved 2022-07-19.
- ^ "Brooklyn Museum: Hannah Wilke". www.brooklynmuseum.org. Retrieved 2018-03-11.
- ^ "Untitled, from the Hannah Wilke Monument | Albright-Knox". www.albrightknox.org. Retrieved 2018-03-11.
- ^ "Marxism and Art: Beware of Fascist Feminism – Works – Des Moines Art Center". emuseum.desmoinesartcenter.org. Archived from the original on 2018-03-12. Retrieved 2018-03-11.
- ^ Tate. "Hannah Wilke 1940-1993 | Tate". Tate. Retrieved 2018-03-11.
- ^ "Hannah Wilke | LACMA Collections". collections.lacma.org. Retrieved 2018-03-11.
- ^ "Wilke, Hannah". www.museoreinasofia.es. Retrieved 2018-03-11.
- ^ "Teasel Cushion". walkerart.org. Retrieved 2018-03-11.
- ^ "U.S.S. Missouri". artgallery.yale.edu. Retrieved 2018-03-12.
- ^ "The Jewish Museum". thejewishmuseum.org. Retrieved 2018-03-12.
- ^ "Collection". The Metropolitan Museum of Art, i.e. The Met Museum. Retrieved 2018-03-12.
- ^ "S.O.S. Starification Object Series (Back)". Guggenheim. 1974-01-01. Retrieved 2018-03-12.
- ^ "Whitney Museum of American Art: Hannah Wilke". collection.whitney.org. Retrieved 2018-03-12.
- ^ "eMuseum". allenartcollection.oberlin.edu. Retrieved 2018-03-12.[permanent dead link]
- ^ "Hannah Wilke | Centre Pompidou". Archived from the original on 2018-03-12. Retrieved 2018-03-12.
- ^ "Hannah Wilke | Princeton University Art Museum". artmuseum.princeton.edu. Archived from the original on 2016-04-29. Retrieved 2018-03-12.
- ^ "Search the Collection | David Winton Bell Gallery". www.brown.edu. Retrieved 2018-03-12.
- ^ "Hannah Wilke, Mountain Creek".[permanent dead link]
- ^ "Exchange: Handle with Care". exchange.umma.umich.edu. Retrieved 2021-01-15.
External links
- Official website
- Nancy Princenthal, Hannah Wilke (Prestel USA, 2010)
- ! Woman art revolution, Documentary trailer shows rare footage of Wilke speaking in 1991, less than two years before her death. The trailer also shows examples of her Intra-Venus series: portraits of her body ravaged by lymphoma.