Martha Wilson

Martha Wilson (born 1947 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American feminist performance artist and the founding director of Franklin Furnace Archive art organization.

Over the past four decades she has developed and "created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through role-playing, costume transformation, and 'invasions' of other peoples personas".

She is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and an Obie Award and a Bessie Award for commitment to artists’ freedom of expression.

She is represented by P•P•O•W gallery in New York City.

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.

In the early 1970s while studying in Halifax in Nova Scotia, she began to make videos and photo/text-based performances.

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.

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.

When she moved to New York City in 1974 she continued to develop and explore her photo/text and video performances.

From this and other works during her career she gained attention within the US for her provocative characters, costumes, works and performances.

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.

In 1976 she founded and became director of the Franklin Furnace Archive, which is an artist-run space that focuses on the exploration and promotion of artists books, installation art, video and performance art.

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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

The works 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.

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 Wilson has been concerned about for four decades.

Her work I have become my own worst fear, first presented in 2011, consists largely of photo/text images shown with a videotape Wilson made in 1974.