20 Facts About Hannah Wilke

Hannah Wilke was born on March 7,1940, in New York City to Jewish parents; her grandparents were Eastern European immigrants.

Hannah Wilke graduated from Great Neck North High School, on Long Island, in 1957.

Hannah Wilke taught art in several high schools for approximately 30 years and joined the faculty of the School of Visual Arts.

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.

Hannah Wilke's work was exhibited nationally and internationally throughout her life and continues to be shown posthumously.

Hannah Wilke's image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.

Hannah Wilke first gained renown with her "vulval" terra-cotta sculptures in the 1960s.

Hannah Wilke's performances evoke the likes of Simone Forti, Trisha Brown, and Yvonne Rainer.

The sculptural art Hannah Wilke created, with its unconventional materials and feminist narratives relates to the work of Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alina Szapocznikow, and Niki de St Phalle.

Hannah Wilke then had herself photographed in various pin-up poses, providing a juxtaposition of glamour and something resembling tribal scarification.

Hannah Wilke has related the scarring on her body to an awareness of the Holocaust.

Hannah Wilke performed this piece publicly in Paris in 1975, having audience members chew the gum for her before she sculpted them and placed them on papers that she hung on the wall.

Hannah Wilke used colored chewing gum as a medium for individual sculptures, using multiple pieces of gum to create a complex layering representing the vulva.

Hannah Wilke died in Houston, Texas, in 1993 from lymphoma.

Hannah Wilke's last work, Intra-Venus, is a posthumously published photographic record of her physical transformation and deterioration resulting from chemotherapy and bone marrow transplant.

The photographs, which were taken by her husband Donald Goddard whom she had lived with since 1982 and married in 1992 shortly before her death, confront the viewer with personal images of Hannah Wilke progressing from midlife happiness to bald, damaged, and resigned.

Hannah Wilke referred to herself as a feminist artist from the beginning.

However, until recently, museums were hesitant to acquire work by women artists who, including Hannah Wilke, engaged in protests decrying their lack of inclusion during the feminist movement of the 1970s.

Since her death, Hannah Wilke's work has been acquired for the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and in European museums such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Hannah Wilke received a Creative Artists Public Service Grant ; National Endowment for the Arts Grants ; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants ; a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an International Association of Art Critics Award.