Martha Wilson
To inaugurate the festival, Giorgia Meloni shares her thoughts on the Italian Futurists, their legacy, and their relationship to contemporary ideas of nationalism, progress, and the future.
Sat, Sep 26
12-1 pm
About the Artist(s)
Martha Wilson (b. 1947) is a pioneering feminist artist and gallery director whose work has, for five decades, explored female subjectivity through role-playing, costume, video, and photographic transformations. Beginning in Halifax in the early 1970s and continuing after her 1974 move to New York, Wilson developed a provocative performance practice centered on identity, gender, and political personae.
In 1976, she founded Franklin Furnace, an artist-run organization dedicated to supporting and preserving artists’ books, installation, video, online, and performance art, particularly forms vulnerable to institutional neglect or political opposition. Wilson also founded and performed with DISBAND, the all-women conceptual punk group, and became known for impersonating figures including Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, and Donald Trump. Her early photo/text works are now considered prescient for their investigations of gender performativity and self-representation, anticipating concerns later explored by artists and theorists including Cindy Sherman and Judith Butler.
@marthawilsonartist
