Martha Wilson & Mark Waskow 8/7/25
Franklin Furnace Founding Director Martha Wilson joins curator Mark Waskow for a presentation and discussion about the exhibition Founded on Artists’ Books: Franklin Furnace 50th Anniversary Tribute.
Franklin Furnace was originally conceived in 1976 to serve artists who were creating artists’ books, a new and somewhat controversial art form at the time. It began as an organization supporting artists who chose publishing as a primary, “democratic” artistic medium, and were not being supported by existing arts organizations.
Today, Franklin Furnace is a crucial downtown New York art space and archive based at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Its mission is to present, preserve, interpret, educate, and advocate on behalf of avant-garde art, especially forms that may be vulnerable, due to institutional neglect, cultural bias, ephemerality, or politically unpopular content. The organization provides venues for the presentation of time-based art, including artists’ books and periodicals, performance art, installation art, and contemporary avant-garde art forms.
Martha Wilson is a pioneering feminist performance artist, gallery director, and the founding director of Franklin Furnace. Over the past five decades, she has created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through role-playing, costume transformations, and “invasions” of other people’s personae. She began making these works in the early 1970s in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and further developed her art practice after moving in 1974 to New York City. She subsequently embarked on a long career that would see her gain attention across the U.S. for her provocative appearances impersonating political figures such as Alexander M. Haig, Jr., Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, Tipper Gore, and Donald Trump. She is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and an Obie Award and a Bessie Award for commitment to artists’ freedom of expression. She is represented by P.P.O.W. Gallery in New York City.
Mark Waskow is an independent curator, collector, and public speaker. In 1998, he became involved with the South End Art Hop in Burlington, Vermont, sparking a passion for the visual arts. He began devoting himself to creating a world-class collection of visual art and embarked on what would become decades of extensive work as president and founder of Burlington’s Northern New England Museum of Contemporary Art (NNEMoCA), to support and expand its collections and reference library. He has also collaborated with artists and provided materials from his own collections to create cutting-edge installations, as well as curated exhibitions from his collections.
