Fred Wilson
From CT4CT: Creative Tools for Critical Times
Fred Wilson (1954) is a conceptual artist from the Bronx who works in a curatorial style by rearranging artwork and artifacts in museum settings. Wilson views the museum as his palette where the order he creates can challenge existing discourses and understandings.
According to Wilson:
I am seeing museum space as a constructed kind of design space, as an installation environment. Very much like an artist you’re manipulating objects, light, color, spatial relationships. So I thought perhaps I could manipulate the space, make it kind of a trompe l'oeil of a museum space. Critiquing, as well, the notion of museum. A lot of times people just think I’m a curator, but in fact the things I’m creating are much more about a meta-narrative than about museums and displays. The subject of the exhibition—which is what most curators are concerned about—takes a back seat to that. I’m just using the museum as my palette, basically.
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Projects
Mining The Museum
In 2003 Fred Wilson was invited to transform the Maryland Historical Society's museum in Baltimore. Making use of the artwork at hand, Wilson acted as a curator illuminating the latent institutional racism existing within today's museums through manipulating the order and arrangement of the art. He strategically juxtaposed specific artifacts next to one another to challenge peoples perceptions of the artifacts' meaning. He previously had completed similar works creating "mock museums" during the 1980's which highlighted museums reinforcement of racist behaviors. Wilson also worked as a free lance museum educator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Crafts Museum as well as the Natural History Museum.
According to Judith E. Stein:
Given the run of the venerable museum, Wilson acted as an artist/curator, using the collection's historical artifacts as his raw materials. His purpose was to raise our awareness of institutionalized racism, making visible the subtle and insidious ways these attitudes affect the decisions museums make about what to collect and how to display it...By titling his installation "Mining the Museum," the artist sowed a three-way pun: excavating the collections to extract the covert presence of racial minorities; planting emotionally explosive historical material to raise consciousness and effect institutional change; and, finding reflections of himself within the museum.
See Also
Speak of Me as I Am
Fred Wilson's Speak of Me as I Am was created specifically for the 2003 Venice Biennale. The work included a Senegalese vendor selling faux designer handbags created by Wilson, carved wooden "blackamoors", a 7 minute clip of othello looped backwards, and a black, 17th Century glass Chandelier.
According to Barbara Pollack:
"It's one thing if you are doing an exhibition somewhere in Europe," says Wilson, "It's another whole thing if you are doing an exhibition where the pavilion says right across the outside 'The United States of America.' " For Venice, Wilson created a mini-museum in one of the pavilion's four rooms with works by Tiepolo and others loaned by local Old Master dealers, and mannequins depicting figures from more famous paintings in the Academe, all featuring black characters from the 14th through the 16th centuries. Arias from Verdi's Otello drift in from an adjoining room, where four monitors play footage of staged performances of the opera. Wilson is intrigued by the predominance of black fictional characters that have filtered into European art, due primarily to the cosmopolitan culture of Venice in this period. Yet, like Othello—perhaps the most famous black character in Western literature, but too often played by white performers in blackface—the darker-skinned residents of this region are still treated as intruders, a specious stereotype that re-emerged in the recent Italian elections.
According to Wikipedia
Fred Wilson, an African-American sculptor, displayed an installation at the 2003 Venice Biennale that incorporated blackamoors. Wilson placed wooden blackamoors carrying acetylene torches and fire extinguishers. Wilson noted that such figures are so common in Venice that few people notice them. He said,"They are in hotels everywhere in Venice...which is great, because all of a sudden you see them everywhere. I wanted it to be visible, this whole world which sort of just blew up for me."
