Erika Wanenmacher

Erika Wanenmacher

Over the last three decades, in an era when the art world undeniably became an industry, Erika Wanenmacher admirably follows her own unlikely and surprising trajectories. This includes a pure desire to communicate heartfelt concerns for the health of our planet and for her fellow earthlings, two-legged and four. She boldly explores denigrated domains of knowledge, especially the nonrational, intuitive realm of magic, gods, goddesses, animal spirits and spells. She calls herself a ‘sculptor of elementals’ – earth, air, fire and water. She is a ‘Culture Witch’.

As an artist who is rooted in a fearless, punk, DIY ethic, Wanenmacher has Americanized the shamanic legacy of Joseph Beuys and her aesthetic spirit is closely aligned with those of Kiki Smith, Tim Hawkinson and Fred Tomaselli. Her ambitions are not limited to the arena of art as it is now defined, but rather she is devoted to the wide world and its mysteries.

As Wesley Pulkka, PhD states in the catalogue essay for Wanenmacher’s 2001 Grimoire exhibition at SITE Santa Fe, “As we fall victim to the black age of iron, we succumb to the numbing effects of reason bereft of emotion at the expense of intuition. When Bill Moyers asked Joseph Campbell what it would be like to live in a society that had no belief in mythology, Campbell answered, “Read the newspapers!” Hopefully Wanenmacher’s ambitious {work} will help make the world more openly intuitive, viably mysterious and more whole.”

Erika Wanenmacher was born in Ohio in 1955. She attended the Kansas City Art Institute in 1975 and the Feminist Studio Workshop in Los Angeles in 1977. Her works have been exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum (St. Louis, Missouri), SITE Santa Fe (Santa Fe, New Mexico), The Center for Contemporary Arts (Santa Fe, New Mexico), Linda Durham Contemporary Art (Santa Fe, New Mexico) and Claire Oliver Fine Arts (New York, New York). Wanenmacher’s are included in the collections of the Albright-Knox Museum of Art (Buffalo, New York), the Fisher Landau Center (Long Island, New York), Museum of Fine Arts (Santa Fe, New Mexico) and Ann Janss (Los Angeles, California).