This fall, Petzel is pleased to resume The Viewing Room, a series of presentations and events bringing together artists, curators, and historians in a rare encounter with new and seminal works. Opening on September 27, The Viewing Room: Hannah Wilke features a selection of landmark photographic works from the 1978 So Help Me Hannah series and a painted ceramic fold sculpture (1970–80s) by the pioneering American artist, accompanied by a talk.

Born in New York City in 1940, Hannah Wilke used various media including sculpture, drawing, photography, performance, and video to reframe constructs of feminism, gender, and sexuality. This selection from So Help Me Hannah is representative of her “Performalist Self-Portraits,” a body of photographic work Wilke created with the assistance of others, most significantly with her partner and husband, Donald Goddard, who she worked with until her death. Here, Wilke simultaneously occupies the roles of artist and subject.

A primary example of artists using their bodies as central material in the 1960s and 70s, Wilke was photographed for So Help Me Hannah at the present site of MoMA PS1 (then the Institute for Art and Urban Resources Inc.), moving through the space nude in high heels, wielding a toy gun, as if pursued in a chase. Evoking tropes of film noir, Wilke uses her own body to intervene in post-war media’s stereotypic representations of women, such as the damsel or femme fatale. In one image, Wilke climbs the stairs, stepping above the viewer through the gridded stairwell, pistol in hand; in another, she lies languid atop a concrete block, hands by her sides, facing the sky.

Wilke’s images were exhibited in a classroom of the recently renovated school building along with her personal collection of ray guns and quotes from prominent intellectuals, which raised questions of recognition for women artists and other art workers. The installation was informed by her recently ended eight-year relationship with fellow artist Claes Oldenburg; Wilke had worked with him in his studio, and had her own studio in his building. Wilke’s gun makes reference to Oldenburg’s Ray Gun Wing of the “Mouse Museum” project (1965–1977), a collection of found, phallic objects resembling the fictional sci-fi weapon, which she helped source and was not credited for despite her significant input. Quoting the philosophies of Karl Marx and others, Wilke theorized alternative arrangements of economic, artistic, and social reciprocities through this comprehensive presentation of her performalist portraits.

Coinciding with this presentation, curator Elisabeth Sherman will be joined in conversation with artist Rachel Harrison on Saturday, September 27, 2025, at 2pm. RSVP is required as space is limited; please email press@petzel.com to reserve your seat.

The Viewing Room: Hannah Wilke coincides with the exhibition Abstract Bodies (on view at 520 W 25th Street until October 25), which includes several of Wilke’s canonical ceramic sculptures—some of which have never been exhibited publicly—alongside a group of rarely seen works on paper.

The Viewing Room series spotlights specially curated works across media and genre by gallery artists, open to the public for a limited time. The series continues this fall, with presentations coinciding with programming such as book signings, artist talks, and screenings, to be announced.

About Hannah Wilke

Emerging in the 1960s alongside the rise of second-wave feminism, Hannah Wilke (b. 1940, New York, NY, d. 1993, Houston, TX) developed a multidisciplinary practice that probed social and cultural constructions of femininity. She created provocative, often vulvic forms that became a language of empowerment, using materials as unexpected as latex, erasers, and chewing gum across sculpture, drawing, performance, photography, and video. Frequently positioning herself as both subject and medium, she created work that was deeply personal. For Wilke, art became a site of resistance and revelation, a space where vulnerability met strength and intimacy met spectacle. She continued to create with unflinching honesty until her untimely death at 52, leaving behind an enduring legacy that continues to influence artists across generations.

Along with her first Retrospective at the University of Missouri in 1989, Wilke’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at major institutions, including The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis (2021); Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase (2008); Artium Museoa, Vitoria- Gasteiz (2006); New Society for Visual Arts, Berlin (2000); Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center, Copenhagen (1995 and 1998); Bildmuseet, Umeå (1998); Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo (1996); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (1995); P.S.1 Institute for Art and Urban Resources, New York (1978); among others.

Wilke’s work is included in collections such the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, USA; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Colección Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA; Helsinki Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland; The Jewish Museum, New York, USA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA; Moderna Museet Malmö, Malmö, Sweden; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; Tate Modern, London, UK; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; among others.

About the Speakers

Elisabeth Sherman is the Robert A. and Elizabeth Rohn Jeffe Chief Curator and Deputy Director at the Museum of the City of New York. Previously, she was Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the International Center of Photography (ICP). Prior to ICP, she held curatorial roles at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she organized and co-organized many critically acclaimed exhibitions including Dawoud Bey: An American Project, Zoe Leonard: Survey, and Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1960-2019. At ICP she curated, among others, Sheida Soleimani: Panjereh, Yto Barrada: Part Time Abstractionist, and ICP at 50.

Rachel Harrison lives and works in Brooklyn. Her solo exhibition Sitting in a Room at the Astrup Fearnley, Oslo (2022–23) followed a mid-career survey, Rachel Harrison Life Hack, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019–20). Her most recent solo exhibition, The Friedmann Equations, was on view at Greene Naftali this past spring. Harrison’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions and catalogs and is represented in major public collections worldwide.