In an article in the New York Times in 2004, titled “Pumping Air Into the Museum, So It’s as Big as the World Outside,” Holland Cotter reviewed a retrospective of Fred Wilson’s work organized by the Center for Art and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland (traveling to other museums, including the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York). Wilson, Cotter says, “has brought a bracing, investigatory spirit to contemporary art.” He explains that because the museum functions as “trophy hall and public relations agency for the dominant cultural and political institutions of the past,” Wilson’s installation work, in which he rearranges objects in the host institution’s collection, are “forensic laboratories for examining the dark side of institutional power.” Cotter concludes that Wilson’s “conceptually pointed, technically polished, visually arresting art is an extended meditation on the necessity of learning to see: to see how art and culture are shaped by social, economic and ideological power, and to see how our relationship to that power can determine what our attitude toward art and culture will be.”
Wilson was born in 1954 in Bronx, New York, and continues to live in New York. His family background is African-American, Euro-American, Cherokee, and Caribbean. Shortly after graduating with a BFA from the State University of New York at Purchase in 1976, he worked in the education departments of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. He has also worked as an installer of artworks at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
His exhibition history began in 1981 with his inclusion in a group show at A.I.R. Gallery. He showed at the Sculpture Center in 1982 and in 1985 participated in “Art on the Beach,” sponsored by Creative Time. In 1988 he created a temporary outdoor sculpture for the Public Art Fund. All of these venues were in New York, as was Wilson’s first one-person exhibition, “The Other Museum,” in 1990 at the alternative art space White Columns (traveling to the Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, DC). In 1990 he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1991 Wilson had one-person exhibitions at two New York galleries: Gracie Mansion and Metro Pictures. He continued to show at Metro Pictures in subsequent years.
In 1992 Wilson created “Mining the Museum” at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore, and in 1993 he showed at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Capp Street Project in San Francisco, and the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. He also has had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1994), the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne in Australia (1998), and the de Young Museum in San Francisco (1999). In 1999 he received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship. In 2003 Wilson represented the United States in the Venice Biennale. Crown Point Press published his first prints in 2004. Wilson’s work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Baltimore Museum of Art, among other museums. He is represented by Pace Wildenstein, New York.
- Kathan Brown
