Gallery Conservation

Artists Faith Wilding and Harry
Gould Harvey have a shared love of walking in the woods and Hildegard von
Bingen - a 12th century German mystic. Botanist Hope Leeson, Lecturer in RISD's
History, Philosophy and Social Sciences, and Landscape Architecture department
will join the artists for an in-person discussion on Wilding's Jungle/Herbal watercolor on paper currently on view in On Paper: Gifts from Paula and Leonard Granoff.

Free with admission.
Registration for this in-person program is requested.

Faith Wilding, a renowned feminist artist, writer, and
educator, is a Visiting Scholar at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for
Teaching and Research on Women. For over four decades her work has remained at
the intersections of feminism, social justice, cyberfeminism, biotechnology,
radical pedagogy, and eco-feminism. Wilding co-initiated the Feminist Art
Programs at California State University, Fresno, and CalArts, Los Angeles in
the early 1970s, and was a founding member of the feminist art movement in
Southern California, chronicled in her book By Our Own Hands (Double XX, Los Angeles,1976).
She is often cited for her influential performance piece Waiting (1972)—reimagined in 2007
as Waiting
With—and Crocheted Environment (widely referred to as Womb Room, 1972). Both of these works
were developed and debuted at Womanhouse, Los Angeles, the dilapidated
Hollywood mansion remade as an arts space by Wilding and her professors and
peers in the Feminist Art Program.

Wilding co-founded, and
collaborates with, subRosa, a cyberfeminist cell of cultural producers using
Bio-Art and tactical feminist performance in the public sphere to explore and
critique the intersections of information and biotechnologies in women's
bodies, lives, and work. She is the author of many published essays on feminist
art and art history, including in The Power of Feminist Art (Abrams,1995); as well as
writings on cyberfeminism and collective feminist work (with subRosa) in Domain
Errors (2003). Her retrospective Faith Wilding’s Fearful Symmetries, organized
by Threewalls, Chicago in 2014, traveled to multiple venues, and Wilding’s work
has been featured in major museum surveys including Fiber: Sculpture
1960-present, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2014); WACK! Art and the
Feminist Revolution, MOCA, Los Angeles (2007); Sexual Politics, Hammer Museum,
Los Angeles (1996); Division of Labor: “Women’s Work” in Contemporary Art,
Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (1995); as well as documenta X, Kassel,
Germany (1997). 

Harry Gould Harvey IV is an artist and
curator whose practices are embedded in community and social justice. His work
is featured in Soft
Water Hard Stone, the
2021 New Museum Triennial, New York, and he has had numerous exhibitions at
Bureau, New York and at national and international spaces including Atlanta
Contemporary, Atlanta, GA (2018) and GRIN, Providence (2016). In 2020 Harvey
and his wife, artist Brittni Ann Harvey, founded the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art (FR
MOCA) on the first floor of the historic Granite Mills textile mill.
Previously, his roving curatorial platform Pretty Days, co-founded with Gregory
Kalliche, produced projects in Providence and Miami, FL.

Hope Leeson is a
botanist with over 30 years of field experience in southern New England. Leeson
is dedicated to documenting Rhode Island’s rare plant populations, native plant
communities, and invasive species, as well as providing public education on
these topics. She has worked for government agencies and private contractors
and has consulting for numerous non-profit organizations. Leeson teaches at the
Rhode Island School of Design. As coordinator of the Rhody Native™ Initiative,
Leeson applied her understanding of native plant communities and plant growth
habits to the sustainable procurement of wild collected seed, propagation, and
consultation with land managers for successful habitat restoration.