In conjunction with the opening of The Viewing Room: Hannah Wilke, join us on Saturday, September 27, 2025, at 2 pm for a conversation between curator Elisabeth Sherman and artist Rachel Harrison as they discuss the groundbreaking work of American artist Hannah Wilke.
About the Speakers
Elisabeth Sherman is the Robert A. and Elizabeth Rohn Jeffe Chief Curator and Deputy Director at the Museum of the City of New York. Previously, she was Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the International Center of Photography (ICP). Prior to ICP, she held curatorial roles at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she organized and co-organized many critically acclaimed exhibitions including Dawoud Bey: An American Project, Zoe Leonard: Survey, and Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1960-2019. At ICP she curated, among others, Sheida Soleimani: Panjereh, Yto Barrada: Part Time Abstractionist, and ICP at 50.
Rachel Harrison lives and works in Brooklyn. Her solo exhibition Sitting in a Room at the Astrup Fearnley, Oslo (2022–23) followed a mid-career survey, Rachel Harrison Life Hack, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019–20). Her most recent solo exhibition, The Friedmann Equations, was on view at Greene Naftali this past spring. Harrison’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions and catalogs and is represented in major public collections worldwide.
About Hannah Wilke
Emerging in the 1960s alongside the rise of second-wave feminism, Hannah Wilke (b. 1940, New York, NY, d. 1993, Houston, TX) developed a multidisciplinary practice that probed social and cultural constructions of femininity. She created provocative, often vulvic forms that became a language of empowerment, using materials as unexpected as latex, erasers, and chewing gum across sculpture, drawing, performance, photography, and video. Frequently positioning herself as both subject and medium, she created work that was deeply personal. For Wilke, art became a site of resistance and revelation, a space where vulnerability met strength and intimacy met spectacle. She continued to create with unflinching honesty until her untimely death at 52, leaving behind an enduring legacy that continues to influence artists across generations.
Along with her first Retrospective at the University of Missouri in 1989, Wilke’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at major institutions, including The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis (2021); Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase (2008); Artium Museoa, Vitoria- Gasteiz (2006); New Society for Visual Arts, Berlin (2000); Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center, Copenhagen (1995 and 1998); Bildmuseet, Umeå (1998); Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo (1996); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (1995); P.S.1 Institute for Art and Urban Resources, New York (1978); among others.
Wilke’s work is included in collections such the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, USA; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Colección Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA; Helsinki Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland; The Jewish Museum, New York, USA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA; Moderna Museet Malmö, Malmö, Sweden; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; Tate Modern, London, UK; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; among others.