The pioneering feminist artist Hannah Wilke had a solo show at Boston’s Genovese Gallery in 1990, and I was lucky enough to see it. Her tiny pink chewing gum sculptures of vulvas floored me — they were so daring, intimate, funny, and feminine. The fruit-flavored bubblegum pieces embodied a continuum of sensual delight beginning in childhood.
More than 30 years later, her second Boston solo exhibition, “Hannah Wilke: Friendship” at LaiSun Keane, also features squibs of chewed and folded gum. Two works from the “S.O.S. Starification Object Series” feature them arrayed in grids on paper — a fleshy adornment to the spare structure that undergirds modern art.
March 24, 2021
