Faith Wilding

Last updated
Faith Wilding
Born1943 (age 80–81)
Paraguay
Alma materUniversity of Iowa,
California State University Fresno,
California Institute of the Arts
Known forPerformance art, installation, multimedia art, arts education
Notable work Womanhouse Embyoworld Series, Womb Room, Wall of Wounds, Battle Dresses, War Subjects, Recombinants, subRosa
MovementCyber Feminism, Feminist Art, Performance Art, Critical Studies, Eco Feminism
Website Official website

Faith Wilding (born 1943) is a Paraguayan American multidisciplinary artist - which includes but is not limited to: watercolor, performance art, writing, crocheting, knitting, weaving, and digital art. She is also an author, educator, and activist widely known for her contribution to the progressive development of feminist art. She also fights for ecofeminism, genetics, cyberfeminism, and reproductive rights. [1] Wilding is Professor Emerita of performance art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. [2]

Contents

Personal life and education

Faith Wilding was born in 1943 in Paraguay and emigrated to the United States in 1961. [3] [4] She holds a degree in English from the University of Iowa. In 1969 she began her graduate studies and then received her Master of Fine Arts degree from California Institute of the Arts. [5] [6]

She was married to Everett Frost, an English professor. Wilding and her husband were anti-war activists and members of the Students for a Democratic Society. While in Fresno, Wilding and her friend Suzanne Lacy became activists for the feminist movement. [5]

Career

Wilding became a teaching assistant in the Feminist Art Program Judy Chicago founded at California State University, Fresno, in 1970. [7] While there, she participated in the month-long, ground-breaking feminist exhibition Womanhouse, held in an empty house in Los Angeles in 1972. For Womanhouse she made Crocheted Environment which she originally called Womb Room (1972) as well as the performance work Waiting. [8]

Wilding wrote about the Feminist art movement in her book By Our Own Hands (Los Angeles, 1976). [9] She has worked in various media including art, video, installations, and performances. [10] Her work has been exhibited in North America, Europe and Asia, including at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Whitney Museum of Art, and the Drawing Center, all in New York City; in Los Angeles at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hammer Museum; the Riverside Art Museum; documenta X, Kassel; Ars Electronica Center, Linz; The Next Five Minutes Festival, Amsterdam; and Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid. [11] Her audio work has been commissioned and broadcast by RIAS Berlin; WDR Cologne; and National Public Radio. [12]

Wilding taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. [13] She has worked as a Research Fellow at the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, [14] and a faculty member of the Master of Fine Arts in Visual Art Program at Vermont College, Norwich University. [15] She has received several grants and awards in art, including a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship. [16]

In 2014 Wilding's solo exhibition and retrospective, Fearful Symmetries opened at Threewalls gallery in Chicago, Illinois. Curated by Shannon Stratton, the exhibition traveled to Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee; The Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California; the University of Houston-Clear Lake in Houston, Texas and the Miller Gallery (now ICA) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The exhibition resulted in the publication of a book by the same name featuring essays by Jenni Sorkin, Amelia Jones, Keith Vaughn, Irina Aristarkova, Mario Ontiveros; Wilding's own writing and interviews by Daniel Tucker and Mira Schor. [17]

She was interviewed for the 2010 film !Women Art Revolution . [18]

subRosa

In 1998, Wilding co-founded with artist Hyla Willis, subRosa, a cyberfeminist organization. [19] The manifesto for subRosa states: “subRosa is a reproducible cyberfeminist cell of cultural researchers committed to combining art, activism, and politics to explore and critique the effects of the intersections of the new information and biotechnologies on women’s bodies, lives, and work… Let a million subRosas bloom!” [19] [20]

subRosa has performed, exhibited, lectured and published in the US, Spain, Britain, Holland, Germany, Croatia, Macedonia, Mexico, Canada, Slovenia, and Singapore. [21] Recent Wilding/subRosa performances/exhibitions include: “The Interventionists”, MASSMoCA; “BioDifference” Biennial of Electronic Arts, Perth, Australia; Performance International, Mexico City, and Mérida, Yucatán; “Cloning Cultures,” National University, Singapore; Welcome to the Revolution, Zurich; Art of Maintenance, Kunstakademie, Vienna. [22] Their works include "Feminist Matter(s): Propositions and Undoing", staged for the Pittsburgh Biennial 2011, that invited visitors to discuss the representation of women in the history of science and technology at tea tables. [23] In 2013, the Women's Caucus for Art announced that Wilding will be a 2014 recipient of the organization's Lifetime Achievement Award. [24]

In 2014, threewalls, a non-profit art gallery in Chicago, held the first retrospective of Wilding's work titled "Fearful Symmetries" that featured artwork spanning 40 years. [25]

In 2019, Wilding was featured in her first solo gallery exhibition, "Scriptorium Revisited", at LA-based gallery Anat Ebgi . The show was featured in Artforum .

In 2021, Faith Wilding held a solo exhibition, "Fossils," at Anat Ebgi Gallery in Los Angeles. The show was featured in Contemporary Art Review LA .

Publications

Author
Coauthor or editor

Visual work

Crocheted Environment

Nicknamed "Womb Room", this piece is a sculptural installation of a large crocheted, weblike structure. [27] Faith Wilding contributed this one room, crocheted environment within the collaborative 1972 Womanhouse installation put together by the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute for the Arts. [27] The piece was also displayed in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, as well as the Bronx Museum, New York, under “Division of Labor: Women’s Work in Contemporary Art.”

Wall of Wounds

Wall of Wounds is an installation of 100 Rorschach prints.[ clarification needed ] Each 6” by 6” print is intended to comment on the social culture by proclaiming one's pre-categorized “wound.” Each print is signed and titled based on the nature of the wound: for example, “political wound,” “sexual wound,” or “phallic wound.”

Battle Dresses

Battle Dresses are a series of paintings entitled “Raped Dress,” “Suppurating Dress,” and “Pregnant Dress.” The series is dedicated to the women of the former Yugoslavia who were raped. The series was created in the period between 1995 and 1997. The entire installation measures 75” by 25” and is done on Vellum using ink and watercolor medium.

War Subjects

War Subjects is composed of 75” by 50” ink and watercolor drawings, which are “the recombined war body of melancholic historical fragments.”

Recombinants

Recombinants are a series of drawings, collages, and paintings that speak to the intersection of plant, human, animal and technological bodies. The piece contains visual and intellectual influences derivative of the Cyborg Manifesto.

Performance work

Duration performance

Wilding gave a performance/lecture on the politics of Information Technology and its relation to femininity as a consequence of the global reconstruction of telecommunication.

Waiting

In one of her most well-known works, Wilding performed Waiting in Womanhouse while sitting down and rocking back and forth. Waiting is a dramatic monologue that shows the passage of time and that throughout every stage - childhood, teenage years, motherhood, and old age - of her life, a woman is expected to wait: to be noticed, to be married, for her children and husband to come back home, etc. The burden of these societal expectations is framed in the performance through aesthetic choices: a rhythmical tone, the long skirt that Wilding was wearing, with her hands obediently kept on her knees. She is waiting to experience life and to feel accepted by herself and society. [28] [29]

Cock and Cunt

This was a role-playing exercise written by Judy Chicago and performed by Wilding and Janice Lester in Womanhouse. This is an interaction between a husband (HE), played by Wilding, and a wife (SHE), played by Lester. Both are wearing comically exaggerated genitalia. It starts in the living room with an argument over dishes and ends in the bedroom where the SHE is murdered by the HE. This play highlights the prevalence and danger of gender roles. [30]

Invitation To A Burning

A mummy-like form filled with plants was burned at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles, California. Individuals participated by filling the burned form with seeds; the seeds sprouted over the course of the three-week installation.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Judy Chicago</span> American artist (born 1939)

Judy Chicago is an American feminist artist, art educator, and writer known for her large collaborative art installation pieces about birth and creation images, which examine the role of women in history and culture. During the 1970s, Chicago founded the first feminist art program in the United States at California State University, Fresno which acted as a catalyst for feminist art and art education during the 1970s. Her inclusion in hundreds of publications in various areas of the world showcases her influence in the worldwide art community. Additionally, many of her books have been published in other countries, making her work more accessible to international readers. Chicago's work incorporates a variety of artistic skills, such as needlework, counterbalanced with skills such as welding and pyrotechnics. Chicago's most well known work is The Dinner Party, which is permanently installed in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. The Dinner Party celebrates the accomplishments of women throughout history and is widely regarded as the first epic feminist artwork. Other notable art projects by Chicago include International Honor Quilt, Birth Project, Powerplay, and The Holocaust Project. She is represented by Jessica Silverman gallery.

<i>Womanhouse</i> Feminist art installation

Womanhouse was a feminist art installation and performance space organized by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, co-founders of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) Feminist Art Program and was the first public exhibition of art centered upon female empowerment. Chicago, Schapiro, their students, and women artists from the local community, including Faith Wilding, participated. Chicago and Schapiro encouraged their students to use consciousness-raising techniques to generate the content of the exhibition. Together, the students and professors worked to build an environment where women's conventional social roles could be shown, exaggerated, and subverted.

Cyberfeminism is a feminist approach which foregrounds the relationship between cyberspace, the Internet, and technology. It can be used to refer to a philosophy, art practices, methodologies or community. The term was coined in the early 1990s to describe the work of feminists interested in theorizing, critiquing, exploring and re-making the Internet, cyberspace and new-media technologies in general. The first use of the term cyberfeminist has been attributed to the art collective VNS Matrix's A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century which was published online in 1991.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Feminist art movement in the United States</span> Promoting the study, creation, understanding, and promotion of womens art, began in 1970s

The feminist art movement in the United States began in the early 1970s and sought to promote the study, creation, understanding and promotion of women's art. First-generation feminist artists include Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Suzanne Lacy, Judith Bernstein, Sheila de Bretteville, Mary Beth Edelson, Carolee Schneeman, Rachel Rosenthal, and many other women. They were part of the Feminist art movement in the United States in the early 1970s to develop feminist writing and art. The movement spread quickly through museum protests in both New York and Los Angeles, via an early network called W.E.B. that disseminated news of feminist art activities from 1971 to 1973 in a nationally circulated newsletter, and at conferences such as the West Coast Women's Artists Conference held at California Institute of the Arts and the Conference of Women in the Visual Arts, at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C..

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Feminist art</span> Art that reflects womens lives and experiences

Feminist art is a category of art associated with the feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. Feminist art highlights the societal and political differences women experience in their lives. The goal of this art form is to bring a positive and understanding change to the world, leading to equality or liberation. Media used range from traditional art forms, such as painting, to more unorthodox methods such as performance art, conceptual art, body art, craftivism, video, film, and fiber art. Feminist art has served as an innovative driving force toward expanding the definition of art by incorporating new media and a new perspective.

VNS Matrix was an artist collective founded in Adelaide, Australia, in 1991, by Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini and Virginia Barratt. Their work included installations, events, and posters distributed through the Internet, magazines, and billboards. Taking their point of departure in a sexualised and socially provocative relationship between women and technology the works subversively questioned discourses of domination and control in the expanding cyber space. They are credited as being amongst the first artists to use the term cyberfeminism to describe their practice; according to artist Anna Couey they outright coined the term along with Sadie Plant .Their first use of the term cyberfeminist was in 1991.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cornelia Sollfrank</span> German cyberfeminist artist

Cornelia Sollfrank is a German digital artist, she was an early pioneer of Net Art and Cyberfeminism in the 1990s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Miriam Schapiro</span> Canadian artist (1923–2015)

Miriam Schapiro was a Canadian-born artist based in the United States. She was a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and a pioneer of feminist art. She was also considered a leader of the Pattern and Decoration art movement. Schapiro's artwork blurs the line between fine art and craft. She incorporated craft elements into her paintings due to their association with women and femininity. Schapiro's work touches on the issue of feminism and art: especially in the aspect of feminism in relation to abstract art. Schapiro honed in her domesticated craft work and was able to create work that stood amongst the rest of the high art. These works represent Schapiro's identity as an artist working in the center of contemporary abstraction and simultaneously as a feminist being challenged to represent women's "consciousness" through imagery. She often used icons that are associated with women, such as hearts, floral decorations, geometric patterns, and the color pink. In the 1970s she made the hand fan, a typically small woman's object, heroic by painting it six feet by twelve feet. "The fan-shaped canvas, a powerful icon, gave Schapiro the opportunity to experiment … Out of this emerged a surface of textured coloristic complexity and opulence that formed the basis of her new personal style. The kimono, fans, houses, and hearts were the form into which she repeatedly poured her feelings and desires, her anxieties, and hopes".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mira Schor</span> American artist, writer, editor and educator

Mira Schor is an American artist, writer, editor, and educator, known for her contributions to critical discourse on the status of painting in contemporary art and culture as well as to feminist art history and criticism.

subRosa is a cyberfeminist organization led by artists Faith Wilding and Hyla Willis.

The feminist art movement refers to the efforts and accomplishments of feminists internationally to produce art that reflects women's lives and experiences, as well as to change the foundation for the production and perception of contemporary art. It also seeks to bring more visibility to women within art history and art practice. The movement challenges the traditional hierarchy of arts over crafts, which views hard sculpture and painting as superior to the narrowly perceived 'women's work' of arts and crafts such as weaving, sewing, quilting and ceramics. Women artists have overturned the traditional view by, for example, using unconventional materials in soft sculptures, new techniques such as stuffing, hanging and draping, and for new purposes such as telling stories of their own life experiences. The objectives of the feminist art movement are thus to deconstruct the traditional hierarchies, represent women more fairly and to give more meaning to art. It helps construct a role for those who wish to challenge the mainstream narrative of the art world. Corresponding with general developments within feminism, and often including such self-organizing tactics as the consciousness-raising group, the movement began in the 1960s and flourished throughout the 1970s as an outgrowth of the so-called second wave of feminism. It has been called "the most influential international movement of any during the postwar period."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cecilia Vicuña</span> Chilean poet, artist and filmmaker

Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean poet and artist based in New York and Santiago, Chile.

The Feminist Art Program (FAP) was a college-level art program for women developed in 1970 by artist Judy Chicago and continued by artists Rita Yokoi, Miriam Schapiro, and others. The FAP began at Fresno State College, as a way to address gender inequities in art education, and the art world in general. In 1971, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro brought the FAP to the newly formed California Institute of the Arts, leaving Rita Yokoi to run the Fresno FAP until her retirement in 1992. The FAP at California Institute of the Arts was active until 1976. The students in the Feminist Art Program read women writers, studied women artists, and made art about being a woman based on group consciousness-raising sessions. Often, the program was separate from the rest of the art school to allow the women to develop in a greenhouse-like environment and away from discerning critiques. While the separatist ideology has been critiqued as reinforcing gender, the FAP has made a lasting impression on feminist art which can be seen in retrospectives, group exhibitions, and creative re-workings of the original projects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nancy Youdelman</span> American sculptor

Nancy Youdelman is a mixed media sculptor who lives and works in Clovis, California. She also taught art at California State University, Fresno from 1999 until her retirement in 2013. "Since the early 1970s Youdelman has been transforming clothing into sculpture, combining women's and girl's dresses, hats, gloves, shoes, and undergarments with a variety of organic materials and common household objects.

Mary DuBose Garrard is an American art historian and emerita professor at American University. She is recognized as "one of the founders of feminist art theory" and is particularly known for her work on the Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi.

Karen LeCocq is an American artist. She is a nationally-known sculptor whose work combines organic materials and found objects.

Shannon R. Stratton is a Canadian artist, writer and curator. She is currently executive director of Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists' Residency in Saugatuck, Michigan.

Prema Murthy is an American, multi-disciplinary artist based in New York. Employing aesthetics, gesture, geometry and algorithmic processes, Murthy's work explores the boundaries between embodiment and abstraction, while engaging in issues of culture and politics. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at MoMA PS1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Reina Sofia Museum, the Generali Foundation in Vienna, and the India Habitat Center-New Delhi.

Judith Kapstein Brodsky is an American artist, curator, and author known for her contributions to feminist discourse in the arts. She received her B.A. from Harvard University where she majored in Art History, and an M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art at Temple University. She is Professor Emerita in the Department of Visual Arts at Rutgers, State University of New Jersey. A printmaker herself, Brodsky is founding Director of the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper in 1996, later renamed the Brodsky Center in her honor in September 2006, and which later joined the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) in 2018. She was also co-founder, with Ferris Olin, of the Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities at Rutgers University in 2006. She was the first artist appointed as president of the Women's Caucus for Art, an active Affiliated Society of the College Art Association.

Sherry Brody was an American artist and pioneering member of the feminist art movement. Brody is known for her work on the Womanhouse project. Her sculpture, The Dollhouse, is in the Smithsonian Museum of American Art collection.

References

  1. ↑ Wilding, Faith (2000). "Monstrous Domesticity". In Bee, Susan; Schor, Mira (eds.). M/E/A/N/I/N/G An Anthology of Artists' Writings, Theory, and Criticism. Durham: Duke University Press. pp. 87–104.
  2. ↑ "Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries, A Retrospective". Contemporary Art Chicago, Threewalls. Archived from the original on 2019-01-09. Retrieved 2019-01-09.
  3. ↑ "Faith Wilding". Oxford Reference Index. Retrieved 7 March 2018.
  4. ↑ Smith, Beryl; et al. (1996). Lives and Works: Talks with Women Artists, Volume 2 . Lanham, MD and London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. ISBN   0-8108-3153-8.
  5. 1 2 Jane F. Gerhard. The Dinner Party: Judy Chicago and the Power of Popular Feminism, 1970-2007 . University of Georgia Press; 1 June 2013. ISBN   978-0-8203-4568-0. p. 27.
  6. ↑ Swartz, Anne K. (2010-02-24), "Wilding, Faith", Oxford Art Online, Oxford University Press, doi:10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.t2086188
  7. ↑ Jane F. Gerhard. The Dinner Party: Judy Chicago and the Power of Popular Feminism, 1970-2007 . University of Georgia Press; 1 June 2013. ISBN   978-0-8203-4568-0. p. 27–28.
  8. ↑ Butler, Cornelia (2007). WACK! art and feminist revolution. Los Angeles: The MIT Press. p. 316. ISBN   978-0-914357-99-5.
  9. ↑ Terry Wolverton. Insurgent Muse: Life and Art at the Woman's Building . City Lights Books; 1 August 2002. ISBN   978-0-87286-403-0. p. 28.
  10. ↑ Peter Howard Selz; Susan Landauer; San Jose Museum of Art. Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond . University of California Press; 2006. ISBN   978-0-520-24053-7. p. 191.
  11. ↑ "Faith Wilding". Vermont College of Fine Arts. Retrieved January 5, 2014.
  12. ↑ "Faith Wilding". Korepress.org. Retrieved 2010-09-18.
  13. ↑ "Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries Retrospective". threewalls. Archived from the original on February 10, 2014. Retrieved February 5, 2014.
  14. ↑ "New Observations /113: Faith Wilding". Plexus.org. Retrieved 2010-09-18.
  15. ↑ "Faith Wilding | Vermont College of Fine Arts". Vermontcollege.edu. Archived from the original on 2010-08-09. Retrieved 2010-09-18.
  16. ↑ "Faith Wilding". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Archived from the original on 2013-11-09. Retrieved 2010-09-18.
  17. ↑ Wilding, Faith. "Faith Wilding's Fearful Symmetries". Intellect Books. Retrieved 2023-02-06.
  18. ↑ Anon 2018
  19. 1 2 Abrams, Loney (2019-01-04). "The Other Art History: The Forgotten Cyberfeminists of '90s Net Art". Artspace. Retrieved 2019-01-09.
  20. ↑ "Biography". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved 2013-03-07.
  21. ↑ "subRosa". cyberfeminism.net. Archived from the original on 2013-02-21. Retrieved 2013-03-07.
  22. ↑ "Bronx Museum of Arts Roundtable". Kabul Reconstructions. Retrieved 2013-03-07.
  23. ↑ Paik, Sherry (2020). "Faith Wilding Biography". Ocula.
  24. ↑ "Women's Caucus for Art". Archived from the original on October 3, 2013. Retrieved June 3, 2013.
  25. ↑ "threewalls exhibition". threewalls. Retrieved June 3, 2013.
  26. ↑ Wilding, Faith (1977-01-01). By our own hands: the woman artist's movement, Southern California, 1970-1976. Santa Monica, Calif.: Double X. OCLC   2943210.
  27. 1 2 "Crocheted Environment". Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. 1972. Retrieved 2019-01-09.
  28. ↑ Raven, Arlene (1994). Broude, Norma; Garrard, Mary D. (eds.). The Power of Feminist Art - The American Movement of the 1970s, History, and Impact. Harry N. Abrams, Inc. pp. 48–65.
  29. ↑ Aristarkhova, Irina (2020). "Arrested Welcome: Hospitality in Contemporary Art". University of Minnesota Press.
  30. ↑ Raven, Arlene (1994). Broude, Norma; Garrard, Mary D. (eds.). The Power of Feminist Art - The American Movement of the 1970s, History, and Impact. Harry N. Abrams, inc. pp. 48–65.

Sources

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.