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

In her most recent work, The Heroines Project, Wiggins selects significant women from biblical, classical, literary and historic sources, such as Eve, Salome, Helen of Troy, Sappho and Cleopatra. She researches these heroines extensively before enacting them in staged photographs taken by Portuguese photographer Luís Branco. Through the medium of her somewhere-in-her-sixties-year-old 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) older woman.

The Heroines Project is part of Wiggins’s larger feminist project titled 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). This long-term project allows Wiggins to question, across time and terrain, 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/