Martha Wilson is an artist who works in performance, video, photography, and text. She is also founding director of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. Wilson is both a feminist artist and a conceptual artist. She has been somewhat inadequately defined by feminist themes when her work is also significantly conceptual, exploring both artist identity and gender identity.
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 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. Wilson felt excluded from NSCAD’s conceptual art community, which was reluctant to take her seriously as a woman and as an artist with no previous credentials. Like most of the art that was being made, taught, and encouraged at NSCAD, Wilson first worked in language-based art. However, 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.”
But Wilson found performance art liberating, using her female body to explore gendered selfhood. In a series of photographic self-portraits entitled “A Portfolio of Models,” Wilson posed as different gendered types: Goddess, Housewife, Professional, Lesbian. Thus, by working in 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’s made-up face (she used makeup as her principal tool of transformation) became a space for transcending gender norms and classifications. 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 1974, Wilson moved to New York City, where she soon turned her loft into an artist-run performance and exhibit space, founding Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. in 1976. For twenty years, Franklin Furnace held exhibitions and performances in its space on Franklin Street in Lower Manhattan, but has since reinvented itself as a “virtual institution” focused on its artist funding, arts education, and online publishing.
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. Her punk band conceptual performance group, DISBAND, (www.youtube.com/disbandny) performed in Rome at Spazio Zero in 1980. 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.
Martha Wilson’s signature performance work is political satire, impersonating First Ladies Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush and Second Lady Tipper Gore. In 2008 Martha 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.”
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 Wilson served as a Guest Editor at 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. Though the non-profit organization and its archive may be Martha Wilson’s most prominent contribution to the arts in New York, her early artwork holds an important place in the history of feminist, performance, and conceptual art.
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