Hannah Wilke

Hannah Wilke
Wilke in her work S.O.S. — Starification Object Series (1974)
Born	Arlene Hannah Butter (1940-03-07)March 7, 1940 New York City, New York
Died	January 28, 1993(1993-01-28) (aged 52) New York City, New York
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) was an American painter, sculptor, photographer, video artist and performance artist.

Hannah Wilke was born in 1940 in New York City to Jewish parents whose parents were Eastern European immigrants. In 1962, she received a Bachelor of Fine Art and a Bachelor of Science in Education from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia. She taught art in several high schools and joined the faculty of the School of Visual Arts, New York, where she taught sculpture and ceramics from 1974–1991. From 1969 to 1977, Wilke was in a relationship with the American Pop artist, Claes Oldenburg, and 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. One-woman gallery exhibitions of her work were first shown in New York and Los Angeles in 1972. Her first one-woman 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 shown in Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Malmo, Sweden in 2000 and at the Neuberger Museum of Art in 2009. Since her death, Wilke's work has been shown in one-woman gallery shows, group exhibitions, and several surveys of women's art, including WACK! (www.moca.org) and Elles (www.pompidou.fr).

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. and they became her signature form which she made in various media, colors and sizes, including large floor installations, throughout her life. A consummate draftswoman, Wilke created numerous drawings, beginning in the early 1960s and throughout her life. In a review of Wilke's drawings at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in 2010, Thomas Micchelli writes 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.