Earlier this fall, New York’s Petzel gallery mounted “Abstract Bodies,” a Hannah Wilke solo show. Among a selection of late-career works by the feminist artist, who died of lymphoma in 1993, aged 52, were four watercolor self-portraits and some of her largest painted ceramic-fold sculptures evoking female genitalia. In the middle of the exhibition’s run, for just a week, the gallery showed five pieces from Wilke’s photographic self-portrait series “So Help Me Hannah” (1978) in their viewing room. A flicker, then it was gone.
I had been researching “So Help Me Hannah” for months, alongside the work of several other women artists exorcising rage and grief through their bodies. Wilke’s pieces began to form a secret key to her practice. I was struck by the photographs’ brief appearance at Petzel, acting as a prelude to her late work. Created in a period during which she was navigating the loss of a major romantic relationship, her mother’s death, and backlash to her work that foregrounded her body and sexuality, they reveal the artist in a raw state with an unequivocal agenda.
The black-and-white photographs of “So Help Me Hannah” paint the colors of rage from simmering to explosive: vengeful, mournful, helpless, incensed. In the series, subtitled “Snatch-shots with Ray Guns,” the artist stalks the grounds of PS1 Institute for Art and Urban Resources (now MoMA PS1) holding a toy pistol. She is naked except for a pair of white high heels. PS1’s gritty urban setting—a school grounds deserted since its closure in 1963 in Long Island City, Queens before being converted to an art space thirteen years later—channels danger and despair. Wilke’s “snatch-shots” subtitle brings to mind pornographic clichés, though her poses just as often recall crime photography or the unvarnished cinematic realism of the ’70s.
Wilke conceived the work in the aftermath of her breakup with Claes Oldenburg in 1977. Within the year, Oldenburg married the Dutch art historian and artist Coosje van Bruggen, whom he would credit as his artistic collaborator for the rest of his life. During Wilke’s relationship with Oldenburg, from 1969 to ’77, she also worked as his studio assistant. Her tasks included documenting his work and sourcing objects for the sculptor’s Ray Guns: a collection of found toys and objects in the form of the vaporizing weapon. In “So Help Me Hannah,” Wilke “re-appropriated” the Ray Guns she once gifted to Oldenburg physically and symbolically.
The Ray Gun was an important form that in the late 1950s propelled Oldenburg’s practice from painting toward happenings, soft sculptures, and pop art. Barbara Rose has called the motif “the key to his reformulation of sculptural values: his projection of body onto object.”1 It also served as an alter-ego. In “So Help Me Hannah,” Wilke takes the gun back as a prop and weapon in the throes of heartbreak. Photographed by Donald Goddard, who would remain her partner and a collaborator for the rest of her life (they married in 1992), the images catalog expressions that cast her as villain and prey.
Wilke debuted forty-eight of the pictures in a solo exhibition at PS1 titled “Snatch shots with Ray Guns collected from 1969–78.” The show also featured Wilke’s collection of “re-appropriated” toy guns and 100 typewritten quotes from writers, critics, and philosophers on index cards. Her show at PS1 was timed to coincide with the Whitney Museum’s exhibition of Oldenburg’s “Mouse Museum and the Ray Gun Wing,” featuring the work that Wilke helped him produce. As art historian Nancy Princenthal writes, “Wilke clearly hoped that viewers would make the connection” between the two exhibitions, “though Oldenburg, who credited by name friends who had helped him collect the toy guns, identified Wilke’s finds only as ‘Group W.’”2
In Wilke’s photographs I see the pain of being romantically discarded registered in her body. I see the refusal to be written off personally, and subsequently erased from art history. Stark, grainy, and confrontational, Wilke’s images are undeniably angry, even petty. If pettiness is an insult for being small-minded, too personal, Wilke confronts the charge head-on by reclaiming her feelings, her work, her credo of “life, over art.”
Petzel’s viewing-room selections from “So Help Me Hannah” surveyed a variety of Wilke’s attitudes, from agent of destruction to passive object. In one image, she squats over a Richard Serra piece dug into PS1’s dirt floor, as though pissing into it. In another, she crouches with her backside to camera, craning her face to the lens, toy pistol in a ready hand. In a luminous shot, she climbs the metal staircase, her lithe silhouette backlit with golden-hour light. In another, she is tumbled back on the stairs with her crotch to the camera—perhaps a knowing wink toward the mannequin corpse in Étant Donnés (1946–66) by Marcel Duchamp, with whose work she extensively engaged.3 In the final image, she lies prone on a wooden structure that resembles a coffin. Throughout the images, there is a sense of self-possession, an understanding of pose, gesture, and narrative within and beyond the confines of erotic art.
In some ways, “So Help Me Hannah” is an outlier in Wilke’s practice. By possessing the Ray Gun phallus, it runs counter to her decade-long exploration of vaginal imagery. Yet I see this series—with its role-playing between violence and surrender—as intensifying the sensual candor that characterized Wilke’s work from the beginning.
As an early-career artist in the 1960s, Wilke began creating sculptures resembling female genitalia from folded clay. The following decade, she continued her exploration of erotic forms with new and unconventional materials. Her latex pieces, such as the “Ponder-r-rosa” series (1974–75), gathered thin layers of scalloped rubber into organic bunches with metal snaps. Critics likened the pieces to labial folds, with Douglas Crimp remarking: “Beyond wanting to touch, one wants to unsnap—to violate. This metaphor of sensuality mixed with vulnerability is frank and touching.”4
In a softer, though no less cunning way, the artist responded to her frustration with the era’s traditional gender roles in the 1971–73 work Laundry Lint (C.O.’s). Pointing to the domestic labor she performed for Oldenburg, she composed a group of vulva-like sculptures from dryer fluff picked off a lint trap and tinted shades of pink and purple. For another series, “Needed Erase-Hers” (1976), Wilke shaped gray erasers into tiny cunts. The pun makes clear that, in Wilke’s estimation, women were as likely to be discarded as valued.
Wilke’s best-known series, “S.O.S. (Starification Object Series),” begun in the mid-1970s, brought together her abiding commitment to female genital representation with the photographic conventions of modeling and advertising. She turned chewing gum, a material that passed through the mouths of friends, lovers, strangers, and herself, into handheld sculptural vulvas. As Wilke is quoted as saying, “I chose gum because it’s the perfect metaphor for the American woman—chew her up, get what you want out of her, throw her out, and pop in a new piece.”
She shaped the gum into her signature one-fold vulva sculptures and applied them to her body—alone and in live performances. She then created an image portfolio for “S.O.S.,” captured by a professional photographer. (She dubbed this mode of working “performalist” self-portraits, which continued with “So Help Me Hannah” and her final series “Intra-Venus.”) In the pictures, Wilke leaned into the fact that she already looked like a model. She posed topless, covering herself with the chewing gum, in guises ranging from cowboy to housewife with curlers. The sculptures dotted her face, neck, and bare chest, drawing comparisons to scars, stigmata, adornment, and buttons. Undeniably marking the body, interrupting its smooth surface, the gum cunts of “S.O.S.” dare the viewer to reduce the artist herself to a cunt. The works garnered mixed reviews, with some feminist critics debating whether her self-portraits amounted to self-objectification.5
Made at the height of the feminist movement, “So Help Me Hannah” is shown and discussed less often than Wilke’s “S.O.S.” era or “Intra-Venus” (1990–93), the devastating self-portraits created during her final years battling cancer. Still, it forms an important hinge between these periods for its explicit desire to foreground personal content and frame female desire through the lenses of rage and grief.
“So Help Me Hannah” also resulted in performances that completed an arc of her mid-1970s work. It can be seen as the final part of a trio that included Through the Large Glass (1976) and Intercourse With… (1977). The former, a striptease in front of Duchamp’s The Large Glass (1915–23) at the Philadelphia Art Museum, has become a classic in the canon of feminist art. The latter, a mournful striptease to a collage of real-life messages from her answering machine, divulges private material—including messages from Oldenburg, presumably recorded well before their breakup. When Wilke removes her sweater, the camera reveals stickers of the names of friends and family stuck to her body, in a proto–riot grrrl gesture.6 Near her heart, she has affixed the names of past and present lovers Donald (Goddard), Claes (Oldenburg) and Richard (Hamilton). In Wilke’s final “act” of the performance, she picks the stickers off with a self-satisfied smirk.
Wilke performed a live-action version of “So Help Me Hannah” several times in the late 1970s and early ’80s. In the 1982 version, at the New York all-women cooperative A.I.R. Gallery, she slowly dances with a toy gun. Her soundtrack includes material recorded from a detective TV show — a male voice frequently intones “I’m sorry” — and her own voice reading quotes that she showed at PS1. The passages include Marx’s words about the commodification of objects, as well as more contemporary material by writers such as Lucy Lippard and Harold Rosenberg. When Wilke, in voiceover, reads a quote by Oldenburg (“Annihilate, illuminate”), it is followed by a gunshot. She falls to the ground.
The Ray Gun photographs of “So Help Me Hannah” had several afterlives. None were more attuned to how grief is registered in the body than Portrait of the Artist with her Mother, Selma Butter (1978–81). In this cibachrome diptych, Wilke juxtaposes her youthful naked body, covered with abstract representations of Ray Guns, with her mother’s, marred by mastectomy scars. Wilke became her mother’s primary care giver from 1978, the year Selma’s breast cancer returned a second time, until her death in 1982. If Wilke’s pose, on the left, suggests eroticism, her mother’s body, on the right, implies the closeness of death following a ravaging illness. Juxtaposed with her mother’s raised, reddened scars, Wilke’s Ray Guns allude to wounds (psychic or otherwise) that may or may not have healed.
Wilke writes about the process of mourning the loss of her mother and her relationship in “Seura Chaya,” a text published in 1988. Although the images of Oldenburg were “lost” to her after his marriage, she insists that “the images I made of myself and my mother kept me alive. Art is a distraction, so is life.”7
Wilke would continue to insist on the entanglement, and distraction, of art and life to the end. She remained locked in a battle with Oldenburg, regarding the use of his image, for another decade, as she continued to make work that explored her web of personal relationships.8 At the same time, she embraced even more color and new materials (including chocolate) in her sculptural work. I thought about her fighting spirit—all that she had made, and all that remained contested—as I viewed “Abstract Bodies” one more time. The show includes self-portraits made on either side of Wilke’s illness, as well as two collections of ceramic sculptures. Primary Life (1983–92), begun before her diagnosis in 1987, assembles nine ceramic-fold sculptures on a tiled wooden base, painted in various combinations of red, yellow, and blue. Untitled (1987–92) is a similar composition of thirty-eight sculptures, this time painted in a uniform matte black. Seen together, they reveal something important about Wilke’s practice: her embrace of pleasure, and her equally fearless exploration of pain. Here, I see her colors of rage and grief as necessary complements to her joy and sensuality.
Hannah Wilke’s “Abstract Bodies” (September 4–October 25, 2025) and “The Viewing Room” (September 27–October 25, 2025) were on view at Petzel, New York.
Barbara Rose, “The Origins of Ray Gun,” Artforum (November 1969).
Nancy Princenthal, Hannah Wilke (Munich: Prestel, 2010), 90.
Wilke’s references to Duchamp’s work and wordplay appear throughout her work. Most notoriously, she performed Through the Large Glass in 1976: a striptease in front of Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) at the Philadelphia Art Museum. Her photographic diptych I Object: Memoirs of a Sugargiver (1977–78), a similar composition to the staircase photograph at PS1, directly references Duchamp’s “salt seller.”
“Read Reviews by Pivotal Art Critic Douglas Crimp on Pat Steir, Larry Bell, Hannah Wilke, and More: From the Archives,” ARTnews, August 2, 2019, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/retrospective/douglas-crimp-artnews-reviews-13043/. Originally published in October 1972
Feminist art critic Lucy Lippard fretted that Wilke’s “own confusion of her roles as beautiful woman and artist, as flirt and feminist, has resulted at times in politically ambiguous manifestations which have exposed her to criticism on a personal as well as on an artistic level.” Lucy Lippard, “The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: Women’s Body Art,” Art in America, May–June 1976, 75–76. Lippard later revised her opinion on Wilke’s practice.
I have always likened Wilke’s gesture of applying names to her skin to the body writing of feminist punk riot grrrls. Writing terms like SLUT on their midriffs was a way to reclaim the autonomy of their bodies and to signal their shared solidarity within the punk subculture.
Hannah Wilke, “Seura Chaya,” published in New Observations, 1988. Reprinted in Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), 150.
For more about Hannah Wilke’s works with images of Oldenburg (and other paramours), see Richard Meyer, “Hard Targets: Male Bodies, Feminist Art, and the Force of Censorship in the 1970s,” in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, ed. Lisa Gabrielle Mack (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2007), 380–82. Lawyer Tim Cone also writes about Oldenburg’s dispute with Hannah Wilke in “Life Over Art: Oldenburg’s Privacy, Wilke’s Publicity,” Arts 64, no. 1 (1989): 25–26.
