May Wilson at Gracie Mansion - New York - Brief Article

Fiction and fact are so intermingled in the work of May Wilson (1905-1986) that even her life story sounds made up. A (relatively) conventional wife and mother until her husband left her for a younger woman in 1966 when she was 61, she moved from Maryland to Manhattan, took up residence at the Chelsea Hotel and devoted the rest of her life to art. Her friends included artist Ray Johnson, who encouraged her early incursions into collage, and Valerie Solanis, notorious for her SCUM manifesto and her attempt on Andy Warhol's life. A film by Amalie Rothschild, titled "Woo Who? May Wilson," included in the exhibition, presents Wilson as an exemplar of a distinctly New York-style bohemia. Clad in mumus and flamboyant homemade jewelry, she is seen padding about in a Chelsea Hotel apartment littered with art-making materials as friends and family drop by.

This exhibition, titled "Ridiculous Portraits and Snowflakes," suggested the range of her approaches. The earliest works on view here were her "snowflakes," which consist of layers of pages from girlie magazines cut into lacy patterns. The resulting collages liter ally play peekaboo, coyly turning bodies into kaleidoscopic abstractions that afford only seductive glimpses of bare flesh.

Wilson's work is in many ways a commentary on the marginalized roles and unreachable standards of beauty to which she felt she and other women had been subjected. The largest number of works on view consisted of Wilson's "ridiculous portraits." To create them, she mugged for the local photo booth, then cut out the resulting self-portrait heads and pasted them onto the bodies of a diverse array of female figures in postcards and art reproductions. Like Woody Allen's Zelig, she pops up everywhere--in a line of curvaceous chorus girls where she gives a wink from under a broad hat, as a flirtatious secretary taking dictation in a short skirt, as a Russian peasant in a field, as a winsome Winslow Homer beachcomber, even as Rembrandt's Jewish bride. Given the distinctly nonideal quality of her grimacing, aging face, her alterations have the effect of an invasion of fantasy by the real. Her enterprise is in many ways a reversal of that of Cindy Sherman, who disappears into a variety of female (and male) personas. Wilson, by contrast, is always herself, deflating pretensions to glamour or romantic sentiment with a wink or an impudently stuck-out tongue.

The show also contained a selection of Wilson's assemblage sculptures made from doll parts and other found objects, but these are generally less original than her collage works. At her best, Wilson brings to mind contemporaries like Jess and her supporter Ray Johnson, though she endows her work with a wickedly feminist twist.

Wilson's unabashed playfulness and Holly Golightly-like sangfroid seem like vestiges of a forgotten time. In the end, her work evokes a long-lost art world, when fun was more important than fame and fortune.

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group