Hannah Wilke was born in 1940 in New York City to Jewish parents whose parents were Eastern European immigrants. In 1962, she received a Bachelor of Fine Art and a Bachelor of Science in Education from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, Philadelphia. She taught art in several high schools and joined the faculty of the School of Visual Arts, New York, where she taught sculpture and ceramics from 1974–1991. From 1969 to 1977, Wilke was in a relationship with the American Pop artist, Claes Oldenburg, and they lived, worked and traveled together during that time. Wilke's work was exhibited nationally and internationally throughout her life and continues to be shown posthumously. One-woman gallery exhibitions of her work were first shown in New York and Los Angeles in 1972. Her first one-woman museum exhibition was held at the University of California, Irvine, in 1976 and her first retrospective at the University of Missouri in 1989. Posthumous retrospectives were shown in Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Malmo, Sweden in 2000 and at the Neuberger Museum of Art in 2009. Since her death, Wilke's work has been shown in one-woman gallery shows, group exhibitions, and several surveys of women's art, including WACK! (www.moca.org) and Elles (www.pompidou.fr).