Hannah Wilke

Hannah Wilke (born Arlene Hannah Butter; (March 7, 1940 – January 28, 1993) was an American painter, sculptor, photographer, video artist and performance artist. Her work is known for exploring issues of feminism, sexuality and femininity.

Hannah Wilke was born on March 7, 1940, in New York City to Jewish parents; her grandparents were Eastern European immigrants. She graduated from Great Neck North High School, on Long Island, in 1957. In 1962, she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Science in Education from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia. She taught art in several high schools for approximately 30 years and joined the faculty of the School of Visual Arts. After her graduation the same year she taught art at high schools in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, from 1961 to 1965, and in White Plains, New York, from 1965 to 1970. After leaving White Plains, she joined the School of Visual Arts, in New York (1972-1991).

From 1969 to 1977, Wilke was in a relationship with the American Pop artist Claes Oldenburg; 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. Solo exhibitions of her work were first mounted in New York and Los Angeles in 1972. Her first full museum exhibition was held at the University of California, Irvine, in 1976, and her first retrospective at the University of Missouri in 1989.

Wilke lived with Donald Goddard since 1982, marrying in 1992 shortly before her death. Posthumous retrospectives were held in Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Malmö, Sweden in 2000 and at the Neuberger Museum of Art from 2008 to 2009. Since her death, Wilke's work has been shown in solo gallery shows, group exhibitions, and several surveys of women's art, including WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Elles at the Centre Georges Pompidou, and Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947 – 2016 at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles.

The Hannah Wilke Collection and Archive, Los Angeles was founded in 1999 by Hannah Wilke's sister Marsie Scharlatt and her family. Since 2009, it has been represented by Alison Jacques Gallery.

Her image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.

Wilke first gained renown with her "vulval" terra-cotta sculptures in the 1960s. First exhibited in New York in the late 1960s, her sculptures are often cited as some of the first explicit vaginal imagery arising from the women's liberation movement. Throughout her life, Wilke incorporated the imagery through various media, colors and sizes, including large floor installations, becoming her signature form. Some of her mediums included clay, chewing gum, kneaded erasers, laundry lint and latex. Wilke's use of unconventional materials is typical of feminist art, nodding to women's historical lack of access to traditional art supplies and education. Wilke reported that the reason she chose chewing gum was because ″it's the perfect metaphor for the American women—chew her up, get what you want out of her, throw her out and pop in a new piece.″

Wilke's sculptures were an innovative example of eroticism, using a style that combined post-minimalism and feminist aesthetics. A consummate draftswoman, Wilke created numerous drawings, beginning in the early 1960s and continuing throughout her life. In a review of Wilke's drawings at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in 2010, Thomas Micchelli wrote 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."