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Martha Wilson: An Interview

Video Data Bank

2010 00:43:43 United StatesEnglishColorMono4:3Video
Tags:
Activism , Feminism , Performance , VDB Interviews , Visiting Artists Program

Description

Feminist performance artist, Martha Wilson (b.1947), is director and founder of the alternative New York art space, Franklin Furnace Gallery, in operation since 1976. In this interview, Wilson discusses her Quaker upbringing, the impetus for her move from Nova Scotia to New York, and the founding of Franklin Furnace, as well as her involvement in the feminist punk band collective Disband.

She also discusses her collaboration with the Guerrilla Girls, a group established in the mid 1980s to confront the art world’s sexism and racism. In the interview, Wilson describes the “sculpting of personality” that mobilized her early investment in art and continued to sustain her later satirical performances parodying the personas of Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, and Tipper Gore.

— Faye Gleisser

Interview conducted by Nara Taylor in November 2010, edited in 2014

 

The Video Data Bank is the leading resource in the United States for videotapes by and about contemporary artists. The VDB collection features innovative video work made by artists from an aesthetic, political or personal point of view. The collection includes seminal works that, seen as a whole, describe the development of video as an art form originating in the late 1960's and continuing to the present. Works in the collection employ innovative uses of form and technology, mixed with original visual style to address contemporary art and cultural themes.

Founded in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement in the United States, the Video Data Bank is one of the nation's largest providers of alternative and art-based video. Through a successful national and international distribution service, the VDB distributes video art, documentaries made by artists, and recorded interviews with visual artists, photographers and critics.