Nanette Wylde

Nanette Wylde is an American artist and writer. Wylde is known for her early incorporation of digital media as a fine art media, electronic literature, and artwork which takes book form.

Wylde makes works which are interdisciplinary, conceptual, narrative, and often involve collaboration with other artists. She works in many media including artist books, digital and electronic media, installation, printmaking, and social practice.

Early life and education Wylde was born in California and grew up in San Jose.

Wylde claims her early influences to be artists Laurie Anderson, Jenny Holzer, Cindy Sherman, Ann Hamilton, Christine Tamblyn, and studying with Rupert Garcia at San Jose State University.

Career Wylde is a narrative artist with focus on storytelling with socio-cultural content. Many of her works are about stereotyping and involve cultural critique. Her themes include re-interpreting historical perspectives, and the reliability of information-based media. She often includes audience participatory elements in her projects which allow participants to contribute to the works in meaningful and permanent ways.

Her electronic works have been exhibited internationally.

Many reviewers comment on the humor in Wylde's work. In a discussion of a Jessica Gomula exhibition, Kim De Vries references Wylde, "This irreverence can be found in other artists working today such as Nanette Wylde . . . and reflects a contemporary skepticism about artistic theories and movements as such; a resistance to taking any of this system of artistic production and criticism too seriously.”

Collaboration with other artists is common in Wylde's practice with her primary collaboration partner being Kent Manske. Notable projects Manske and Wylde have worked together on include Foodies, Meaning Maker, Preserves, and You are the Tree.

Her works are taught in university level literature and art classes.

Artist's books Wylde works in the genre artist's books in which the artwork references or takes book form.

Wylde makes books under the imprint Hunger Button Books. Her artist's books have exhibited widely, won awards, and are included in international book arts collections.

Digital media Wylde began using digital media tools, Photoshop and Painter software, to create images in 1991. She often combined software with traditional printmaking such as lithography and relief printing. Her work is included in several early software (Photoshop and Painter) publications.

Wylde began working in interactive multimedia in 1994 while studying at Ohio State University's Advanced Computing Center for Art and Design. Her graduate thesis project was an interactive multimedia artwork titled A Brief History. The project was feminist in content, focusing on women's history and celebrating female diversity. The project included an interactive installation of images mounted on small wood blocks which the audience could move about on a series of small shelves to create their own narratives. most frequently in an electronic flipbook format. Her electronic projects often allow audience input. Many use the computer's random function.

Carolyn Guertin writes about Wylde's electronic flipbooks, Arrested, Belief Manifesto and haikU, “Drawing from three different data streams, these texts recombine them to create instant works of art from a community experience. Arrested works along similar lines but more closely shows a genealogy with text-based experiments by feminist artists like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger. Exploring our expectations of social posturing and the politics of rhetoric, Arrested toys with our expectations. Combining racial and ethnic groups with the politics of everyday activities, the texts consistently test our assumptions and challenges us to rethink them. While Arrested does not require the reader to input material, it does work to restate the reader in relation to the material she is reading. In short, It requires us to change our perspective and insert ourselves into the textual community to experience new points of view.”

Social Practice Wylde works in the art genre of social practice. Her Meaning Maker project, which are free fill-out-form pamphlets on different subjects is one example. She works in the community by creating opportunities for other artists in the form of exhibitions and publications. Exhibitions Wylde has curated include Eco Echo at WORKS San Jose and Gallery Route One in Pt. Reyes Station, California; Pathways at Art Ark in San Jose, California; Biophilia at WORKS San Jose; Conceptually Bound at California State University in Chico and at The Mohr Gallery in Mountain View, California; The Legacy of Jo Hanson at Yolo Arts in Woodland, California. She creates publications featuring other artists' work in the form of exhibition catalogs and an annual anthology titled Entanglements. about so many things, electronic flipbook, 1998 Meaning Maker, social practice project, democratic multiple, net.art, installation, 2006 Leaving Digital, electronic literature, net.art, 2023 Almutanabbi Street Starts Here archive, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, New York Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Bainbridge Island, Washington Baylor University Libraries, Waco, Texas Boise State University Albertson's Library Duke University Library, Durham, NC George Mason University, Fenwick Library, Fairfax, VA Olin Library, Cornell University, Ithica, New York San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, CA The Center for the Study of the Book, The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom Tufts University Tisch Library, Medford, MA University of California, Berkeley: Artists' Books Collection UC Davis Shields Library, Davis, CA UC Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO University of Iowa Library, Iowa City, Iowa University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI University of Pennsylvania Libraries, Philadelphia, PA University of Washington Libraries, Seattle, Washington