Martha Wilson is a pioneering feminist artist who, over the past five decades, created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through role-playing, costume transformations, and “invasions” of other people’s personae. She is also the founder of Franklin Furnace, an organization that champions avant-garde art, especially forms that may be vulnerable due to institutional neglect, cultural bias, ephemerality, or politically unpopular content. And, she has been one of ICI’s longest-running and most treasured collaborators.
Wilson co-curated one of ICI’s first traveling exhibitions, Artists’ Books U.S.A., with Peter Frank in 1978. She had just founded Franklin Furnace to champion the exploration, promotion and preservation of time-based and ephemeral art mediums that were often disregarded, including artists’ books, installation art, video, mail and performance art.
Over the next 50 years, Wilson and Franklin Furnace would support many practices challenging institutional norms, the roles artists play within society, and expectations about what constitutes acceptable art mediums. Both Franklin Furnace and ICI have long been part of the New York art ecosystem, and today are both members of the Coalition of Small Arts NYC and Ruth Arts In Dialogue.
ICI has also celebrated and documented Martha Wilson’s groundbreaking career as an experimental artist. The ICI traveling exhibition Martha Wilson took her work out of New York and connected hosting curators with her directly to further explore her ideas in new contexts. This was accompanied by The Martha Wilson Sourcebook, a collection of many materials documenting her practice over 40 years.
In 2015, ICI presented “Performing Franklin Furnace” at Participant Inc., a celebration of the exhibition, sourcebook, and Franklin Furnace’s legacy in New York. It featured a symposium on "Performing, Re-enacting, and Reacting"; performances by Michael Smith, Coco Fusco, and a series hosted by Clifford Owens; and screenings of films from the Franklin Furnace Archive. Pratt Manhattan Gallery also organized an accompanying exhibition of Franklin Furnace and Martha Wilson’s materials.
While conducting research during one of ICI’s first curatorial fellowships, Muriel Enjalran (2012 French Institute fellow) learned about Martha Wilson’s work. 10 years later, Enjalran—now Director of the Frac Sud-Cité de l’art contemporain—curated a major solo exhibition of Wilson’s work, and the first in France.