Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The first monograph on an artist whose provocative and ultimately deeply moving work played an essential part in women's transformation of the art world. Hannah Wilke's artwork, like her life, frames a heroic story about formal invention and social activism, personal loyalties and individual freedom, and, above all, breathtaking risk. A defining presence in the emerging community of women artists in the 1960s and 70s, Wilke developed a unique and controversial visual language in response to her own and women s experience. An unapologetic individualist, she celebrated her relationships with men as well as women and frankly explored the pleasures of sexuality. Using a wide range of non-traditional mediums, including latex and chewing gum as well as photography and film, she irreverently paid tribute to predecessors from Marcel Duchamp to David Smith. Focusing on the body as instrument and object of visual expression, Wilke made her art an unremitting self-exploration without false modesty (when her naked body was an uncomplicated delight to behold) or shame (when it was mercilessly blighted by cancer). Wilke's art is inseparable from Wilke the person bold, sometimes outrageous, and, ultimately, heartbreakingly courageous. AUTHOR: Nancy Princenthal, a New York-based art critic and lecturer, and Senior Editor at Art in America, has written on contemporary art for 25 years. She is the author of numerous books on art and a co-author of After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art. ILLUSTRATIONS 150 photos *

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CHOICE Review

For the last 30 years Hannah Wilke's work has been at the center of debates concerning the intersection of art, the body, and social activism because of the complex manner in which she deployed her scantily clad or nude body in performance, video, and still photography to analyze the effects of patriarchal power on the sexual agency of women. Although many other women artists of her generation used similar strategies in creating art attuned to the politics of feminism and the women's movement (e.g., Carolee Schneemann and Eleanor Antin), Wilke's work has never been as easily accepted as being empowering of women, and has instead often been described as narcissistic. In this comprehensive, copiously illustrated monograph of Wilke, who died in 1992 after a long battle with breast cancer, critic/lecturer Princenthal succeeds in (1) presenting a nuanced, illuminating chronological account of Wilke's life and work, including her earliest experiments with nude self-portraiture as a teenager and often-ignored sculptural oeuvre; and (2) reckoning with Wilke as an artist influenced by and questioning of the ideologies of the women's movement. By comparing Wilke's creations with more recent work by such artists as Janine Antoni, Princenthal also contextualizes Wilke's polarizing work and demonstrates its enduring legacy. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty/researchers. K. Rhodes Drew University