Art for Life's Sake

Hannah Wilke: Art for Life's Sake surveys one of the most groundbreaking artists to emerge in American art in the 1960s, Wilke, who challenged prevailing representations of women's bodies until her death in 1993.

The book brings together photographs, works on paper, video, and sculpture in materials such as latex, kneaded erasers, and chewing gum, with new object photography that makes many rarely shown pieces accessible for the first time. It includes a previously unpublished 1975 interview with Wilke by the critic Cindy Nemser and archival photographs tracing her career. Essays are by Glenn Adamson, Connie Butler, and curator Tamara Schenkenberg, with responses by the artists Hayv Kahraman, Nadia Myre, Jeanine Oleson, and Catherine Opie. It was published with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, to accompany an exhibition there from June 2021 to January 2022.

Wilke established a feminist iconography across painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance, using her own body to offer what the publisher calls a life-affirming expression of vitality and bodily pleasure.