Sherry Wiggins

Colorado conceptual artist Sherry Wiggins and Portuguese photographer Luís Filipe Branco have been working together on performative photographs with Wiggins as the subject since 2015. Their work questions stereotypical constructs of the aging (and invisible) older woman with their portrayals of Wiggins as a strong, sexy, funny, complicated, and unrelenting female matriarch and sometimes femme-fatale.

For the exhibit at Michael Warren Contemporary, “On Sappho, Helen and Aphrodite,” Wiggins embodies the ancient Greek heroines - the great poetess Sappho, Helen of Troy, and the goddess Aphrodite - in luscious, staged photographs. This series is part of Wiggins and Branco’s ongoing “Heroines Project,” where Wiggins selects significant women from biblical, classical, literary, and historic sources such as Eve, Salome, Cleopatra, and the Egyptian goddess Isis. Wiggins does intensive research on these various heroines and subsequently embodies them in her somewhere-in-her-sixties-year-old form in collaborative photographs taken by Branco. Wiggins and Branco’s photographs purposely reinterpret the fictions, the histories, and the misogynist viewpoints that have been imprinted on these women.

Wiggins and Branco have shown their work in the U.S. and in Portugal in major exhibitions including: “Meeting Her Again” (2017) in Estremoz, Portugal and at Michael Warren Contemporary (2017), “Selected Works” for Month of Photography (2019) at Redline Contemporary Art Center, “THE UNKNOWN HEROINE” (2021) at Michael Warren Contemporary, “The Mirror Between Us” (2022) in Evora, Portugal, and “Exit Paradise” (2023) at Seidel City in Boulder, Colorado. She received both BFA (1988) and MFA (2005) degrees from the University of Colorado, Boulder.