Hannah Wilke
in ‘Traces of Care’, Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, New York
29 March – 13 April 2025
Hannah Wilke, Untitled, c. 1964-66, Graphite on card © Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles. Licensed by VAGA at Artist’s Rights Society (ARS), New York, DACs, London
Hannah Wilke is included Traces of Care, a three-person exhibition at Wallach Art Gallery, alongside Janine Antoni and Hannah Levy. Traces of Care explores how these two simple words have gained profound significance since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Borrowing from Walter Benjamin’s well-known aphorism, ‘to live is to leave traces’, Traces of Care aims to make visible the invisible traces of care and support structures that surround us, whether those be our own bodies, the individuals who surround us, or our spaces and objects.
Each from a different generation, the artists offer a range of diverse perspectives on memory, the body, vulnerability, illness, and labor that challenge and disrupt our expectations of resilience and distress and shine a light on our own fragility and the care structures that are vital in our society.