Sherry Wiggins is an interdisciplinary artist who sees her work as a feminist and relational process and enactment. Over the last several decades, her artistic practice has taken multiple forms in a variety of modes and media, including drawings, installations, performances, photographs, sculptures, video and writings. Wiggins’s work is collaborative, reflexive and globally engaged. She has collaborated with other artists and cultural organizations on projects in Portugal, Holland, France, Brazil, India and the Middle East, as well as in the United States.

In her long-term project, HEROINES, Wiggins selects significant women from biblical, classical, literary and historical sources. These women include Eve, Salome, Helen of Troy, Sappho, Mary Magdalene, the goddess Isis, Cleopatra and others. She researches these heroines extensively before enacting them in staged photographs taken by Portuguese photographer Luís Branco. Through the medium of her late-sixties, now early-seventies form, Wiggins reinterprets the fictions and the histories of these women, always in critical dialogue with the misogynistic viewpoints that have been imprinted upon them. This performative work, which portrays Wiggins as a strong, sexy, funny, complicated and unrelenting matriarch and sometimes femme fatale, questions stereotypical constructs of the aging, often invisible woman.

For several years, Wiggins has been studying the life and works of French artist Claude Cahun (1894 – 1954). Wiggins refers to Cahun as her queer superheroine. In the ongoing project, I’m in Training (with Claude Cahun), Wiggins and photographer Luís Branco have been working on a body of performative photographs that are in direct conversation with Cahun’s remarkable black-and-white photographic portraits. Wiggins inserts herself into many of the same roles that Cahun has embodied in her photographic and performance work: as a body builder, a gentleman, as the Buddha, the Devil and more. This work (both Cahun’s and Wiggins’s) addresses the theater of identity, gender, androgyny and narcissism.

Both the HEROINES project and I’m in Training (with Claude Cahun) are part of Wiggins’s larger feminist project, Searching Selves: An Intersubjective Art Practice with Remarkable Women Artists of the 20th Century. Again, through research and deep consideration, Wiggins identifies artists whose work corresponds with her own in content, process and/or materials. As a result of her excavations and contemplative interactions with these artists, Wiggins has produced drawings, installations, photographs, performances and writings. Thus far, she has studied Portuguese conceptualist Helena Almeida (1934 – 2018), French writer and photographer Claude Cahun (1894 – 1954), Russian American avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren (1917 – 1961), Indian minimalist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937 – 1990) and Brazilian artist Mira Schendel (1919 – 1988). Across time and terrain, Wiggins interrogates her own notions of self and identity in relationship with ideas of artistic territory, process and documentation.

Wiggins’s work has been exhibited in China, India, Mexico, the Middle East, Portugal, South America and throughout the United States. She received both Bachelor of Fine Arts (1988) and Master of Fine Arts (2005) degrees from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Wiggins lives in Boulder, Colorado and is represented by Michael Warren Contemporary in Denver. She documents her artistic investigations and processes on her blog:

 https://sherrywigginsblog.com/