Fred Wilson and Institutional Critique

Fred Wilson was born in the Bronx, New York in 1954, and lives and works in New York. He received a BFA from SUNY/Purchase. Commenting on his unorthodox artistic practice, Wilson has said that, although he studied art, he no longer has a strong desire to make things with his hands. “I get everything that satisfies my soul,” he says, “from bringing together objects that are in the world, manipulating them, working with spatial arrangements, and having things presented in the way I want to see them.” Thus, Wilson creates new exhibition contexts for the display of art and artifacts found in museum collections, along with wall labels, sound, lighting, and non-traditional pairings of objects. His installations lead viewers to recognize that changes in context create changes in meaning. While appropriating curatorial methods and strategies, Wilson maintains his subjective view of the museum environment and the works he presents. He questions—and forces the viewer to question—how curators shape interpretations of historical truth, artistic value, and the language of display, and what kinds of biases our cultural institutions express. In his groundbreaking intervention, “Mining the Museum” (1992), Wilson transformed the Baltimore Historical Society’s collection to highlight the history of slavery in America. For the 2003 Venice Biennale, Wilson created a mixed-media installation of many parts, focusing on Africans in Venice and issues and representations of black and white, which included a suite of black glass sculptures; a black-and-white tiled room with wall graffiti culled from texts of African-American slave narratives; and a video installation of Othello screened backwards. Wilson received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award (1999) and the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award (2003). He is the Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Object, Exhibition, and Knowledge at Skidmore College. Fred Wilson represented the United States at the Biennial Cairo (1992) and Venice Biennale.

For more on Fred Wilson and his work, check out this episode of PBS series Art: 21. It's a great series, but if you want to skip ahead, Wilson's segment begins at chapter 6.