Gallery Conversation

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.

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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.

Image: Faith Wilding, Jungle/Herbal, 2016. Museum purchase: gift of Paula and Leonard Granoff.