Faith Wilding seated on a platform performing Waiting at Womanhouse, Los Angeles, 1972 — fig.001 — Faith Wilding performing "Waiting" at "Womanhouse," Los Angeles, California, 1972

As an avowed eco-feminist, Faith Wilding's work addresses the deterioration of the natural world in her lifetime, specifically in South America and her native Paraguay.

Wilding (born 1943 in Primavera, Paraguay) depicts symmetrical dualities: up and down, in and out, open and closed, evoking mystical, personal, and esoteric narratives. The works express interconnectedness and spiritual exuberance while exploring the visionary iconology of the energy and force of growth.

Wilding's practice emerged at the forefront of Feminist Art in Los Angeles during the late 1960s and 1970s. For the last 50 years, Wilding has lived as an activist and artist fiercely committed to eco-feminism. As a student at Fresno State, Wilding and fellow artist-activist Suzanne Lacy organized consciousness-raising groups and participated in the formation of the first Feminist Art Program. She subsequently attended CalArts, where she was the graduate teaching assistant for the Feminist Art Program.

The Feminist Art Program produced "Womanhouse," an art installation and performance space focusing on collaborative and feminist ideas. Fueled by the explosion of female-focused work and research, "Womanhouse" sought to move beyond the predominantly male-centric art history. Wilding's work continues to interrogate societal narratives, challenging the status quo in art-making, life, and politics.

Wilding has exhibited extensively worldwide since the late 1960s. A 2014 retrospective of Wilding's work, "Fearful Symmetries," traveled to five venues across the United States. Wilding's work was also included in the seminal survey "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution," organized by Cornelia Butler, which traveled from the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles) to the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, D.C.), P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (Long Island City), and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

2022 marked the fiftieth anniversary of "Womanhouse," an influential Los Angeles exhibition, installation, and performance space organized through the "CalArts Feminist Art Program." At "Womanhouse," Wilding's "Womb Room" fiber installation and performance "Waiting" are some of the best-known and highly influential works of the 1970s Feminist Art Movement. Wilding's book "By Our Own Hands" catalogs this important era of experimentation and collaboration that defined West Coast Feminist art during the early 1970s.

Faith Wilding painting Natural Parables on her studio wall, 1978 — fig.002 — Faith Wilding in her studio working on "Natural Parables," 1978

Faith Wilding beside her drawings in Arrows of Desire at Brown University, 2021 — fig.003 — Faith Wilding featured in "Arrows of Desire," David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, 2021

Exhibition History

Wilding has exhibited at museums and international exhibitions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Drawing Center, New York, NY; documenta X, Kassel, Germany; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; the Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid, Spain; the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, Scotland; and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, NY. Wilding is Professor Emerita of Performance Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has taught at Cooper Union, New York University, the Woman's Building in Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Art Institute.

While teaching at Carnegie Mellon University in the 1990s and 2000s she was a co-founder of the cyberfeminist collective "subRosa." Wilding was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009 and has been the recipient of numerous grants for the past five decades. In 2014, she was awarded the prestigious Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award. Her publications include "By Our Own Hands: The Woman Artist's Movement, Southern California, 1970–1976" (Double X, 1977) and "Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices" (Autonomedia, 2003). Wilding lives and works in Rhode Island.