FAITH WILDING

This is Wilding’s third solo exhibition with the gallery and first career-spanning presentation in New York. Tracing key developments in her prolific output including historic and recent works, the exhibition illuminates throughlines in Wilding’s rich visual vocabulary that explore philosophical themes of lifecycles, openings, rebirth, emergence, growth, transformation, and possibility.

Addressing the deterioration of the natural world in her lifetime, plant life and agriculture play an important role in Wilding’s expressions of interconnectedness. Her iconography comprises shells, eggs, the cocoon or chrysalis, mermaids, “dress,” particularly armour, blood, and winged insects, as well as seeds, flowers, buds, stems, branches, and leaves.

The exhibition includes painting, drawing, watercolour, collage, papier-mâché sculptures, and papyrus scrolls, alongside ephemera: notes, sketches, performance documentation, and photographs. Key bodies of work included are: Battle Dresses, works from her Scriptorium and Hildegard series, and Rorschach Watercolours, alongside early and new (2024) works that comprise script and image. Together the works present a fuller picture of Wilding’s continued engagement with biopolitics, spiritual exuberance, and the strength of bare emotion.

Avowed eco-feminist, Wilding emerged at the forefront of Feminist Art in Los Angeles during the late 1960s and 1970s where she gained recognition through her oft-cited contributions to Womanhouse (1972): both the performance Waiting, a 15-minute scripted monologue condensing a woman’s entire life into a monotonous, repetitive cycle of waiting for life to begin while she is serving and maintaining the lives of others, and the installation Crocheted Environment, referred to popularly as “Womb Room,” a web-like fibre installation that now resides at the Institute for Contemporary Art / Boston, brought into the collection in 1995 by then Chief Curator, Helen Molesworth and was recently installed at Haus der Kunst, Munich for the exhibition Inside Other Spaces. Environments by Women Artists 1956-1976.

Prior to her time studying at CalArts, where she was the graduate teaching assistant for the Feminist Art Program, Wilding was a student and activist in Fresno organising consciousness raising groups with fellow student Suzanne Lacy. Over 50 years has passed since Wilding’s early years in California, this exhibition presents a fresh view of her expansive practice, interrogating societal narratives, challenging the status quo in art-making, life, and politics.