🔍
Advanced Search

From ArtNet.com -- Fred Wilson is an American conceptual artist. Wilson frequently uses “the museum as medium.” He first rose to prominence after the success of his 1992 exhibition “Mining the Museum” at the Maryland Historical Society, in which he placed unlikely objects next to each other in order to challenge the overlooked nature of racial and social tensions in the institutional sphere. By pairing things like silver tea sets and slave shackles in vitrines together, Wilson has since said that he didn’t intend to shock, but to have “people to come in and realize that they had to do some work, to put it together.” Born in the Bronx, New York in 1954, Wilson got his BFA from SUNY Purchase in 1976, where he was the only black student in his program. He worked as a museum guard, a preparator, and a freelance museum educator before eventually beginning his explorations into museum as medium in the 1980s. Even though he works with museum collections to create his works, Wilson does not see himself as a curator. As he explained, “the things I’m creating are much more about a meta-narrative than about museums and displays... I’m just using the museum as my palette, basically.” After the success of “Mining the Museum,” Wilson received a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1999, and went on to represent the United States at the 2003 Venice Biennale with a multimedia installation, Speak of Me as I am. The installation included Wilson’s work in Murano glass, which he first began making in 2001, as a means to explore the history of the city’s African population. Since then, Wilson has expanded his work in glass, showing large-scale chandelier works at the 2017 Istanbul Biennale and at Pace Gallery New York in 2019. His work is held in public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Hammer Museum, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the MFA Boston, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Perez Art Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Tate, London, and the Whitney Museum.