To be overwhelmed again and again by the duality of life. To find pain bandaging my flesh and no comfort. To realize that the only action possible is to “keep the divine vision in time of trouble”. To find a way to teach this to my body. To be neither cynical, resigned, falsely optimistic, nor lethargic. To find the well-springs of ecstasy to carry me through. To be bound faithfully to my passion and to preserve this passion and carry it every day. Not to give in and not to give up. To resist without becoming bitter. To keep leaning into the keen wind. To discard husk after husk till nothing remains but the monumental core, white as bone. To continue stretching the spirit outward from the core of the body. To gather the mantle of flesh around me, to gird my loins and stand undefeated.

(Faith Wilding, 1977)

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Inside, outside, alive in the shell, a solo exhibition surveying over five decades of the career of pioneering ecofeminist artist Faith Wilding. On view at 372 Broadway from January 17 through March 1, an opening reception will take place on Friday, January 17 from 5-7 pm.

This is Wilding’s third solo exhibition with the gallery and first career-spanning presentation in New York. Tracing key developments in her prolific output including historic and recent works, the exhibition illuminates throughlines in Wilding’s rich visual vocabulary that explore philosophical themes of lifecycles, openings, rebirth, emergence, growth, transformation, possibility.

Addressing the deterioration of the natural world in her lifetime, plant life and agriculture play an important role in Wilding’s expressions of interconnectedness. Her iconography comprises shells, eggs, the cocoon or chrysalis, mermaids, “dress”, particularly armor, blood, winged insects, as well as seeds, flowers, buds, stems, branches, and leaves.

The exhibition includes painting, drawing, watercolor, collage, papier-mâché sculptures, papyrus scrolls, alongside ephemera: notes, sketches, performance documentation, and photographs. Key bodies of work included are: Battle dresses, works from her Scriptorium and hildegard series, Rorschach watercolors, papyri sculptures, alongside early and new (2024) works that combine script and image. Together the works present a fuller picture of Wilding’s continued engagement with biopolitics, spiritual exuberance, and the strength of bare emotion.

Avowed eco-feminist, Wilding emerged at the forefront of Feminist Art in Los Angeles during the late 1960s and 1970s where she gained recognition through her oft-cited contributions to Womanhouse (1972): both the performance Waiting, a 15-minute scripted monologue condensing a woman’s entire life into a monotonous, repetitive cycle of waiting for life to begin while she is serving and maintaining the lives of others, and the installation Crocheted environment, referred to popularly as Womb room”, a web-like fiber installation that now resides at the Institute for Contemporary Art / Boston, brought into the collection in 1995 by then Chief Curator, Helen Molesworth and was recently installed at Haus der Kunst, Munich for the exhibition *Inside other spaces. Environments by women artists 1956-1976.

Prior to her time studying at CalArts, where she was the graduate teaching assistant for the Feminist Art Program, Wilding was a student and activist in Fresno organizing consciousness raising groups with fellow student Suzanne Lacy. Over 50 years has passed since Wilding’s early years in California, this exhibition presents a fresh view of her expansive practice, interrogating societal narratives, challenging the status quo in art-making, life, and politics.

Faith Wilding (b. 1943, Paraguay) has nurtured an art and activist practice to address the deterioration of the natural world, spiritual exuberance, and biopolitics. Her experience of growing up in a pacifist commune in Paraguay (as part of the Bruderhof Anabaptists) with little contact with the outside world had a tremendous impact on her. Ecstatic childhood experiences of wild nature, studying the South American jungle forests and waterways planted early seeds that would inform her work upon arriving in the U.S. at age 18. She quickly combined these experiences with her research into connections between women and nature, examining the ecological, in-spirited philosophies of ecofeminism to bring old truths back into new vision.

Wilding has exhibited extensively since the late 1960s including museums such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer Museum, The Drawing Center, Documenta X, Kassel, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, the Singapore Art Museum, the Reina Sofia Museum, and the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow.

A retrospective, Fearful symmetries, traveled to five venues across the United States. Her 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 (Washington DC), PS1 Contemporary Art Center (Long Island), and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Her work is in the collections of the Hammer Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, Minneapolis Institute of Art, RISD Museum, University Club of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and her papers were acquired by the Getty Research Institute Library.

Wilding is Professor Emerita of Performance Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and taught at Cooper Union, New York University, the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Art Institute, and Carnegie Mellon University where she was a co-founder of the cyberfeminist collective, subRosa.

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. 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. Wilding lives and works in Massachusetts.