Art Basel Unlimited: Faith Wilding

Completed in 1982, Faith Wilding’s Natural Parables is a 12-piece work that comprises pairings of large watercolor-drawing hybrids with corresponding oil on masonite paintings shaped like seed pods. The six illuminated parables fuse two branches of her practice – highly detailed imagery inspired by nature as a metaphor for transformation. Commingling handwritten script and visual iconography, Wilding creates an apparatus of verbal and visual notation to explore specific ideas about women’s transformation; the metamorphosis of the natural world through human intervention and destruction; and the body and nature as a codependent political site. The creation of Natural Parables marked the culmination of years of research into female mythologies, paganism, English Romantic poetry, illuminated herbals, bestiaries, and alchemical manuscripts.

Faith Wilding (b. 1943, Paraguay) has nurtured an art and activist practice to address the deterioration of the natural world, spiritual exuberance, and biopolitics. Her experience of growing up in a pacifist commune in Paraguay (as part of the Bruderhof Anabaptists) with little contact with the outside world had a tremendous impact on her. Ecstatic childhood experiences of wild nature, studying the South American jungle forests and waterways planted early seeds that would inform her work upon arriving in the U.S. at age 18. She quickly combined these experiences with her research into connections between women and nature, examining the ecological, in-spirited philosophies of ecofeminism to bring old truths back into new vision.

Avowed ecofeminist, Wilding emerged at the forefront of Feminist Art in Los Angeles during the late 1960s and 1970s. As a student at Fresno State, Wilding and fellow artist-activist Suzanne Lacy organized consciousness raising groups and participated in the formation of the first Feminist Art Program. She subsequently attended CalArts where she was the graduate teaching assistant for the Feminist Art Program and 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 serving and maintaining the lives of others, and the installation Crocheted Environment, referred to popularly as “Womb Room,” a web-like fiber 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.

Wilding has exhibited extensively since the late 1960s including museums such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer Museum, The Drawing Center, Documenta X, Kassel, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, the Singapore Art Museum, the Reina Sofia Museum, and the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow. A retrospective, Fearful Symmetries, traveled to five venues across the United States. Her work was also included in the seminal survey WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, organized by Cornelia Butler, which traveled from the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles) to the National Museum of Women (Washington DC), PS1 Contemporary Art Center (Long Island), and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Her work is in the collections of the Hammer Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, Minneapolis Institute of Art, RISD Museum, University Club of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and her papers were acquired by the Getty Research Institute Library.

Wilding is Professor Emerita of Performance Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and taught at Cooper Union, New York University, the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Art Institute, and Carnegie Mellon University where she was a co-founder of the cyberfeminist collective, subRosa. 

Wilding’s book By Our Own Hands, catalogs this important era of experimentation and collaboration that defined west coast Feminist art during the early 1970s. Wilding was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009 and has been the recipient of numerous grants for the past five decades. In 2014, she was awarded the prestigious Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award. Wilding lives and works in Massachusetts.