Martha Wilson (born 1947 in Newtown, Pennsylvania) is an American feminist performance artist and the founding director of Franklin Furnace Archive art organization.
[1][2] 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".
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.
"[8] 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.
However, in recent years it has become much more less[clarification needed] female subjectivity through her work in role-playing, transformations into different types of women through costumes and the use of other people's personas.
[11] 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.
[1] 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 Henes, Ingrid Sischy and Diane Torr.
[11] 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".
[11][13] 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.
[14] More recently, she was part of the "Gloria: Another Look at Feminist Art in the 1970s" exhibit at White Columns in New York City in 2002 and DISBAND was included in the WACK!
In a New York Times review of the show, Holland Cotter asserted that Martha Wilson is one of "the half-dozen most important people for art in downtown Manhattan in the 1970s.
"[4] From March until May 2009, an exhibition by Wilson and Peter Dykhuis for the Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax provided a deeper meaning and understanding of the work that she has created through a number of still images and constructed characters that surround the interpretations that one may have to a certain type of person.
Her selection of 30 projects from 30 years of programming at Franklin Furnace also becomes a self-portrait of sorts as she highlights works that are historically significant for pushing boundaries within exhibition and display culture as well as society at large.