ABSTRACT
Over the past four decades, Martha Wilson has created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through role-playing, costume transformations, and invasions of male and female personas. She began making videos and photo/text works in the early 1970s when she was working toward a PhD in English at Dalhousie University and teaching English at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where, in a male-dominated conceptualist milieu, her work was not taken very seriously. Wilson further developed her performative and video-based practice after moving in 1974 to New York City. Two years later she founded Franklin Furnace, which she continues to direct, an artist-run center in Tribeca dedicated to the exploration and promotion of artists’ books, installation art, and video and performance art, an organization whose mission would be “to make the world safe for avant-garde art.” For the past 40 years, Franklin Furnace has championed art forms often neglected by mainstream arts institutions due to their ephemeral nature or politically unpopular content.
Franklin Furnace’s mission to present, preserve, interpret, proselytize, and advocate on behalf of avant-garde and time-based visual art has been unwavering. Despite its notoriety, Franklin Furnace has maintained its original commitment to serving emerging artists; to assuming an aggressive pedagogical stance with regard to the value of avant-garde art to life; and to fostering artists’ zeal to broadcast ideas. Since its founding, Franklin Furnace’s activities have expanded to include artists’ books and periodicals, installation art, performance art, and other unforeseen contemporary avant-garde art forms.
With founder and director Martha Wilson at the helm, Franklin Furnace is often considered an artwork in itself, encapsulating and continuing the spirit of experimentation and provocation particular to the New York art scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The organization’s archives contain rich source documents, such as artists’ correspondence, slide and b/w photographic images, press releases, announcement cards and posters, project proposals including resumes, drawings, video, and now, digital files.
