Fred Wilson, Cabinetmaking 1820-1960, 1992 Fred Wilson is an American artist of African-American and Caribbean descent who represented the United States at the 2003 Venice Biennale. He was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1954, received a B.F.A. from the State University of New York at Purchase in 1976, and lives in New York City. Wilson is best known for rearranging museum collections, using the same design techniques museums use but coming up with a different point of view. In a work called “Cabinet Making” in the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, in 1992, for example, he placed four elegant parlor chairs facing a whipping post from a Maryland jail. Even his gallery exhibitions often mimic museum interiors. For an exhibition at his New York gallery, Metro Pictures, in 1991, he displayed four skeletons laid out in glass cases, labeled “Someone’s Sister,” “Someone’s Mother,” and so on. Wilson’s work sets up ways for people to step for a moment beyond their habits in connecting seeing to understanding.
Paolo Veronese, Triumph of Venice (detail), 1585 Wilson spent a good deal of his childhood in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His father was an international consulting engineer and his mother a schoolteacher. “I thought all kids knew about art from their moms,” he says. After graduating from college with a major in art practice (sculpture), he worked in the education departments of the Met and the AMNH, and later was an installer at MOMA.
His installation in Venice was in two parts. The first was a museum-like interior that featured found objects like glass figurines holding trays (Wilson removed their heads to emphasize their anonymity) and Renaissance paintings of Venice. Each of the paintings contained the image of a black person, usually (but not always) a servant. In the entrance rotunda of the United States pavilion was an enormous Venetian chandelier made of black glass. This was a work of Wilson’s that anticipated the second room of the exhibition, which concentrated on recent work of his own invention.
Fred Wilson, Drip, Drop, Plop, 2001 The centerpiece of that room was an alcove dizzyingly tiled in black and white. There were also four televisions simultaneously broadcasting different performances of the opera Othello and a series of black glass drips on the wall and drops on the floor, some endowed with eyes that look upward quizzically.
Wilson has said that his recent work concerns “relationships and what’s really important in life.” The etchings published by Crown Point Press in 2004 fall into this category. To make them, the artist dripped acid onto copper plates to create what are, literally, ink spots in the finished prints. “In my work, I’m usually pretty sure of what’s going to come out,” he said. “But in this case, I just did it. It’s exciting and scary. I have no idea what others will see in it, or how they will relate it to my work.”
Fred Wilson, Grey Area, 1993 The ink spots in Wilson’s etchings pulse, expand, and seem to explode. “All kinds of things are going on in this microcosm or macrocosm,” Wilson says. In three of the six prints, conversations are going on. Tiny word balloons float among the spots. The words were all spoken by black characters in literature, characters created by white writers from Shakespeare to Herman Melville, to Arthur Miller, to Jean Genet. Wilson says that he “refashioned these characters by putting them together. I took them out of their contexts and put them in context with other voices to see what would happen.”
Three of the prints do not have word balloons. “In my own mind,” Wilson says, “I think of the characters in the prints that don’t have talk balloons as not talking at the moment, or talking so quietly that you can’t understand them. But of course once someone takes an artwork some, it is what it is to the person who has it.”
—Kathan Brown
Visit the New York Times online to read a review of Fred Wilson’s work:”Pumping Air Into the Museum, So It’s as Big as the World Outside,” by Holland Cotter. The New York Times, Friday, April 30, 2004.