Martha Wilson

Education and early career

After attending George School, a Quaker prep school in her hometown of Newtown, Pennsylvania, Wilson graduated cum laude with a B.A. from Wilmington College, a Quaker college in Ohio, in 1969. She then attended graduate school at Dalhousie University in 1971 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada before starting her work teaching at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax—then a hotbed of conceptual art. She felt excluded from NSCAD’s conceptual art community, which was reluctant to take her seriously as a woman and as a young artist. Like most of the art that was being made, taught, and encouraged at the school, Wilson first worked in language-based art.

Career

She soon focused on performance art—using her own body as her medium. This choice further distanced her from her conceptual artist peers, who denigrated performance work on principle, upholding "the Cartesian subservience of the body to the mind."

She created photographic self-portraits called A Portfolio of Models, where she posed as many different gender types including: "Goddess," "Housewife," "Lesbian" and "Professional." By working with role-playing and masquerade, "the process of self-objectification was paradoxically experienced as positive, for it cleared a space which could be filled by her own self-determined visibility and agentic subjectivity." Wilson used make-up to create her transformation, when producing her face for her performance where she herself became a space for transcending gender norms and showing what people classify and expect from different female gender types. In Wilson’s own words, "absence of self is the free space in which expression plays. Thus the ‘obstacle,’ the painted surface, is ironically the means of expression." In her early career, her work was mostly autobiographical. However, in recent years it has become much more less female subjectivity through her work in role-playing, transformations into different types of women through costumes and the use of other people's personas. In 1976 she became a member of Disband, an all-female group of performance and other artists that developed feminist songs. Through this work with Disband she created and developed the character of Alexander M. Plague, Jr. This character along with many others both fictional and real were used over her career including one of Barbara Bush.

Franklin Furnace

In 1974, she moved to New York City, where she changed the loft in her own house into an artist-run performance and exhibit space, founding Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. in 1976. Between 1976 and 1996 Franklin Furnace held many different exhibitions in its storefront space on Franklin Street in Tribeca situated in Lower Manhattan. The Archive presented historical and contemporary exhibitions of artists books along with some installation pieces and art to the public. Franklin Furnace has since reinvented itself as a "virtual institution", where its main aim is to fund artists, focus on art education and the online publication of works not usually in the public's eye.

Disband

Disband, an all-female vocal performing artists group were based in New York City from 1978 to 1982, were formed by Wilson, IIona Granet, Donna Hennes, Ingrid Sischy and Dianne Torr. The band didn't see themselves are musicians, but instead a group of artists who performed using spoken word and noise, creating songs such as: "Every Girl", "Hey Baby", and "Fashions". The band's sound was that of a cappella, performing mostly at the storefront space at Franklin Furnace. In 2008 the group reunited and performed at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, where they performed as part of "WACK! Art and Feminist Revolution," an exhibition put together by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The group became increasing popular with feminists, especially those in the art world, who were like-minded and understood the lyrics.

I have become my own worst fear

P•P•O•W was founded by Wendy Olsoff and Penny Pilkington in the first wave of the East Village art scene in New York City in 1983. In 1988 the gallery moved to Soho and in 2002 to Chelsea. P•P•O•W maintains a diverse roster of national and international artists. Since its inception, the gallery has remained true to its early vision, showing contemporary work in all media. It also has a commitment to representational painting and sculpture and artists who create work with social and political content. Wilson has worked closely with this gallery showing her works/events and exhibitions here since joining in May 2011.

The works with the gallery are embedded with the ideas Martha has been concerned about for four decades. Her new work "I have become my own worst fear" consists largely of photo/text image which will be shown with a videotape Wilson made in 1974. The works on view consist of nine new photo/text works created in 2008 along with two early works in her career, Alchemy, from 1973 and My Authentic Self from 1974.

Performance and earlier exhibitions

Since the early 1970s, Wilson has performed and exhibited her work at various galleries and museums in New York City and elsewhere. In 1973, her Breast Forms Permutated was included in the "c. 7,500" exhibit of conceptual art made by women at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. In April of that year, she also performed Selfportrait at Project Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. More recently, she was part of the "Gloria: Another Look at Feminist Art in the 1970s" exhibit at White Columns in New York City in 2002 and DISBAND was included in the WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2007 as well as the Incheon Women Artists' Biennale in Incheon, South Korea in 2009.

Her signature performance work is political satire, impersonating First Ladies Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush and Second Lady Tipper Gore. In 2008 Wilson had her first solo exhibit in New York, "Photo/Text Works, 1971-1974" at the Mitchell Algus Gallery in Chelsea, New York City. In a New York Times review of the show, Holland Cotter asserted that Martha Wilson is one of "the half-dozen most important people for art in downtown Manhattan in the 1970s."

Staging the Self

From March until May 2009, an exhibition by Wilson and Peter Dykhuis for the Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax provided a deeper meaning and understanding of the work that she has created through a number of still images and constructed characters that surround the interpretations that one may have to a certain type of person. Wilson created photographic and video works that explored her female subjectivity through the extensive use of role playing, costume transformations and invasions of male and other female personas. This exhibition highlights the stages of Wilson’s creative contributions (with the use of Franklin Furnace as all were archived there) within the context of early feminist and socially engaged studio practice as well as her dissemination of the work of like-minded individuals through the endorsement of Franklin Furnace. Central to the exhibition is Wilson’s presence as an agent of transformative change, initially in her artwork and then her facilitation of cultural change through her directorial presence at Franklin Furnace. Her selection of 30 projects from 30 years of programming at Franklin Furnace also becomes a self-portrait of sorts as she highlights works that are historically significant for pushing boundaries within exhibition and display culture as well as society at large. The exhibition travelled through 2013 under the auspices of Independent Curators International.

Selected Performances & Exhibitions

1972

1973

1974

1975

1976

1980

1985

1992

1994

2002-

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2013

2014

Recent events

Video performances

Wilson's works are mainly involved with image, not the image from the piece she has created but instead the image surrounding a topic or subject. An example is her work from 1974, "a portfolio of models", in which she creates a series of models through the understanding that one's self has itself the topic in question. The Housewife, The Goddess, The Working Girl, The Professional, The Earth Mother and The Lesbian are examples of Wilson's. This series of images are based upon ones stereotypical view of the subject matter. There are many works of Wilson consisting of both image, body and video show casing characters she has created to connect with many other realities, find below a list of her work.

As Nancy Reagan

As Barbara Bush

As Tipper Gore

Academic work

Wilson has lectured widely on the book as an art form, performance art, and "variable media art," at New York University, the School of Visual Arts, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and elsewhere. In 1997 she served as a guest editor at College Art Association's Art Journal, for which she wrote an article on the origin of performance art. Between 2003 and 2006, she served as guest editor of Leonardo magazine, for which she wrote an article on live art on the Internet. Wilson has received numerous grants for her performance art, such as two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She has also received praise for her support of freedom of expression, including an Obie Award for commitment to artists’ freedom of expression.

As Franklin Furnace Archive’s founding director, Martha Wilson is an important proponent of contemporary variable media. Franklin Furnace was once the largest collection of artist books in the United States and remains an important historical establishment for the still largely ignored artist book medium. Franklin Furnace Archive continues to support the contemporary avant-garde through funds awarded to under-represented artists creating contemporary work. The New York Times' Cotter and Karen Rosenberg have written that though the nonprofit organization and its archive may be Wilson’s most prominent contribution to the arts in New York City, her early artwork holds an important place in the history of feminist, performance, and conceptual art.

2011 events at Concordia University, Montreal

Selected grants and awards

Books and monographs

Writing