Galerie Edition Artelier - Edition Part One 2002

1990	The Other Museum, White Columns, New York
1991	Primitivism: High & Low, Metro Pictures, New York
	The Other Museum, Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Gracie Mansion Gallery, New York
1992	Biennial Cairo, Egypt
	Panta Rhei: A Gallery of Ancient Classical Art, Metro Pictures, New York
	Mining the Museum, The Contemporary and Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore
1993	The Museum: Mixed Metaphors, Seattle Art Museum (catalogue)
	The Spiral of Art History, Indianapolis Museum of Art Beaver College Art Gallery, Glenside, Pennsylvania
	An Invisible Life: a View into the World of a 120 Year Old Man (an Off-Site Installation by Fred Wilson), Capp Street Project, San Francisco
1994	OpEd: Fred Wilson, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
	Insight: In Site: In Sight: Incite - Memory, Artist and the Community: Fred Wilson, South Eastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina (cat.)
1995	Collectibles, Metro Pictures, New York
1997	Collectibles, Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco
	Reshuffling the Deck: Selections From the UC Davis Collections, Richard L. Nelson Gallery & the Fine Arts Collection, University of California, Davis
1998	Viewing the Invisible, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, Austrailia (brochure)
2000	Drawings & Maquettes For A Light Rail Station Jersey City Museum, New Jersey (broch.)
2001	Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations, 1979-2000 Fine Arts Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore

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Selected Group Exhibitions:

1982	Ornament as Sculpture, The Sculpture Center, New York
	Looks at Books, ABC NO Rio, New York
	Grand Army Plaza: Three Sculptors, Grand Army Plaza Arch, Dept. of Parks, New York
1983	The Monument Redefined, Gowanus Memorial Artyard, New York
	After Dark, William Patterson College, Paterson, New Jersey
1984	Exchange of Sources: Expanding Powers, Real Art Ways, Harford, Connecticut
	Racist America,Dramatis Personae Gallery, New York
	Sticks and Stones-Modern/Post Modern Sculpture, Kenkeleba Gallery, New York
1985	Art on The Beach, Creative Time Inc., New York
	Visions, Rediscovered, Castillo Gallery, New York
1986	The Bronx Celebrates: Alternative Spaces, Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx
	Ando/Wilson, New Sculpture, John Jay College Art Gallery, New York
1987	Selection from The Artists File, Artists Space, New York
	Intellects and Idiosyncrasies, 55 Mercer Gallery, New York
1990	The New School Collects: Recent Acquisitions, Parsons School of Design, New York
	Public Mirror: Artists Against Racial Prejudice, Clocktower Gallery, New York
1991	SITEseeing: Travel and Tourism in Contemporary Art, Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, New York
1992	Past Imperfect: A Museum Looks At Itself, The Parrish Art Museum, Southhampton (cat.)
	Rosamund Felsen Clinic (cuated by Ralph Rugoff), Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles
	Putt-Modernism, Artist's Space, New York
	Translation (curated by Kim Levin), Centrum Sztuki Wspolczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw, Poland
	Inheritance, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles (cat.)
	The Order of Things: Toward A Politic of Still Life, Real Art Ways, Hartford, Connecticut
	The Big Nothing or Le Presque Rien, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (cat.)
	Transgressions in the White Cube: Territorial Mappings (organized by Joshua Decter), USDAN Gallery, Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont (cat.)
1993	Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
	Readymade Identities, Museum of Modern Art, New York
	Construction in Process IV: My Home is Your Home, The Artists' Museum, Lodz, Poland
	The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism, University of California at Irvine
	Artists Respond: The New World Question, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York
	Ciphers of Identity (organized by Maurice Berger), Fine Arts Gallery, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore
1994	Don't Look Now, Thread Waxing Space, New York
	Die Orte der Kunst, Sprengel Museum, Hannover
	Crash: Nostalgia for the Absence of Cyberspace, Thread Waxing Space, New York
	Western Artists/African Art, Museum for African Art, New York
	Transformers: The Art of Multiphrenia, traveling exhibition organized by Independent Curators Incorporated
	Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art,The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Armand Hammer Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles (cat.)
	Cocido Y Crudo, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (cat.)
1995	Configura 2 - Dialog der Kulturen - Erfurt 1995, Erankfurt, Germany
1996	Cultural Economies: Histories from the Alternative The Drawing Center, New York
	Inklusion: Exklusion, Steirischer Herbst 96, Graz, Austria
	Fragments: Proposta per a una colleccio de fotografia contemporania, Museo d'Art Contemporani, Barcelona (cat.)
	New Histories, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (cat.)
	Burning Issues: Contemporary African-American Art, Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale
	Designation, Galerie & Edition Artelier, Graz, Austria
	Millennium Eue Dress, The Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia
1997	Collected, The Photographer's Gallery and British Museum, London
	Museum Studies: Eleven Photographer's Views, High Museum of Art, Atlanta Millenium Eve Dress, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati
	Heart, Mind, Body, Soul: American Art in the 1990's, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
1998	Postcards From Black America, Hedendaagse Afrikaans-Amerikaanse Kunst, Boschstraat, The Netherlands (cat.)
	Viewing the Invisible, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne (cat.)
	Re-Presentation, Freedman Gallery, Albright College Center for the Arts, Reading, Pennsylvania (cat.)
1999	Microminiatures from Armenia: The Eye of the Needle; The Greeting Gallery, Yerba Bueno Center for the Arts, San Francisco
	To the Rescue: Eight Artists in an Archive, International Center of Photography, New York; Miami Art Museum, Florida; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas
	The Museum as Muse, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (cat.)
	Uniform, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson
	Trace, The Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, Liverpool (cat.)
2000	Outbound: Passages From the 90s, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston
2001	Play's The Thing, (Organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program) Art Gallery of The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, New York (broch.)
	W, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dole, France
	Crossing the Line, Queens Museum of Art, Flushing, New York
	Museum as Subjects, The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (cat.)
	Unpacking Europe, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands (cat.)
2002	EDITIONS PART ONE 2002, Galerie & Edition Artelier Graz

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Selected Bibliography:

1988	Jean Fisher, Rooms With A View, Artforum, March
1990	Lois E. Nesbitt, Fred Wilson: White Columns, Artforum, October, pp. 172
	Kim Levin, Turning the Tables, The Village Voice, June 19
	Kim Levin, Bad Timing, The Village Voice, March 6
1991	Michael Kimmelman, Fred Wilson - Metro Pictures, The New York Times, March 22, pp. C19
	Maurice Berger, On Nationality: 13 Artists, Art in America, September, pp. 131-2
	Debra Bricker Balken, Fred Wilson at Gracie Mansion and Metro Pictures, Art in America, July, pp. 113-4
	Enid Schildkrout, Ambiguous Messages and Ironic Twists: Into the Heart of Africa and The Other Museum, Museum Anthropology, May, pp. 16-23
	Pamela Lee, Autokritik, Texte zur Kunst, Spring, pp. 189-90
	Joshua Decter, Fred Wilson at Metro Pictures, Arts, Summer, pp. 92
	Robert Mahoney, Fred Wilson at Gracie Mansion, Arts, May, pp. 98-9
1992	Michael Kimmelman, An Improbable Marriage of Artist And Museum, The New York Times, August 2, pp. 27
	Hilton Als, The Ghosts in the Museum. Artist Fred Wilson Mines History, The Village Voice, September 22, pp. 41
	Julia M.Klein, Mining the Museum Hangs Galleries with Their Own Rope, The Philadephia Inquirer, June 2, pp. C3
	Susannah Cassedy, The Museum Mine Field, Museum Notes, July/August pp. 12-4
	Environmental Terror, essay by Maurice Berger, Fine Arts Gallery, University of Maryland Baltimore, Catonsville
	Donald Kuspit, The Magic Kingdom of the Museum Artforum, April, pp. 58-63 Amei Wallach, A Vision of Green, NY Newsday, March 24, pp. 54-5
	John Dorsey, Mining the Stores of History with a New Mind-Set, The Sun, Baltimore, April 5, pp. 1
	Translation, essay by Kim Levin, Centrum Sztuki Wspolczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw, Poland (cat.)
	Past Imperfect: A Museum Looks At Itself, The Parrish Art Museum, Southhampton
	Jo Ann Lewis, Coming Out From the Shadows of History,The Washington Post, August 30, pp. G1, G6
	Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum, Grand Street, #44, pp. 151-72 (portfolio)
	Sarah Tanguy, Fred Wilson - Maryland Historical Society, Sculpture, Sep/Oct. pp. 76
	The Big Nothing Or Le Presque Rien, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York
	Transgressions in the White Cube: Territorial Mappings, essay by Joshua Decter, USDAN Gallery, Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont
	David Kelleran, Fred Wilson at Metro Pictures, Flash Art, Nov/Dec, pp. 98
	Inheritance, essay by Joshua Decter and Kobena Mercer, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibiitons, Los Angeles
	Lois Nesbitt, Fred Wilson at Metro Pictures, Artforum, November, pp. 105-6
	Adam McGovern, Fred Wilson - Metro Pictures, Cover Magazine, December
1993	Politically Correct Museums, The Economist, January 16-22, pp. 85-6
	Ron Carlowen, Canon Fodder; Fred Wilson at the Seattle Art Museum, Artweek, April 8, pp. 29
	Steve Mannheimer, Positioning is Key to Questioning Museums, The Indianapolis Star, January 24
	Nan Hoffman, Artist Finds IMA's Soul, Indianapolis News, January 21, pp. F15
	John Dotsey, Mining exhibit shatters records, opens eyes at Historical Society, Baltimore Sun, pp. 1D
	Bruce Barcott, Mixed-up Museum, Seattle Weekly, February 10, pp. 35-9
	Robert Mittenthal, Fred Wilson: Mixed Metaphors at S.A.M., Reflex, January/February, pp. 14-5
	Ciphers of Identity, essay by Maurice Berger, Fine Arts Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
	The Museum: Mixed Metaphors, text by Patterson Sims, Seattle Art Museum
	Regina Hackett, Artist Challenges How Museums Treat Culture, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, February 2, pp. C1
	Judith E. Stein, Sins of Omission, Art in America, October, pp. 110-5
	Joan Smith, Invisible Man Sited,San Francisco Examiner, August 18, pp. C-1, C-4
	Glen Helfand, Victorian Secrets, SF Weekly, September 1, pp. 17
	David Bonetti, The Secrets of a Magical History Tour, San Francisco Examiner, August 27, pp. E10-E11
	John Brumfield, Marginalia: Life in a day of Black L.A. or, The Theater of Refusal, Art Issues, No. 29, September/October, pp. 24-7
	Panta Rhei: A Gallery of Ancient Classical Art, Binocular, ed. E. McDonald and J. Engberg (ill. Atlas, Lips, Laocoon, Sphinx), Moet & Chandon
	Donald Garfield, Making the Museum Mine: An Interview with Fred Wilson,
	Museum News, vol. 72, no. 3, May/June
1994	Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson, ed. by Lisa G. Corrin, The New Press, New York
	Holland Cotter, African Genesis: What Western Artists Like, The New York Times, May 27
	Alice Thorson, Fred Wilson Puts Extra Thoughts Into Museum Displays, Kansas City Star, May 22
	Kim Paice, Book Review: Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson, World Art, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 90-1
	Bill Stamets, Conceptual Artist Has His Way With MCA's 'Dreaming' Show, Chicago Sun Times, June 26, pp. B2
	Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, essays by Elizabeth Alexander et al, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Armond Hammer Gallery, University of California at Los Angeles
	Tom Patterson, Exhibits Challenge Viewers to Rethink Cultural Assumptions, Winston-Salem Journal, Sept. 4, pp. C3
	Martha Buskirk, Interviews with Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, and Fred Wilson, October, vol. 70, pp. 109-12
	Insight: In Site: In Sight: Incite - Memory, Artist and the Community: Fred Wilson, South Eastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina
	OpEd: Fred Wilson, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
	Elizabeth Hess, Visible Man, The Village Voice, Nov. 22, pp. 31-4
	Reesa Greenberg, Making Up Museums: Revisionism and Fred Wilson, Parachute, No. 76, Oct./Nov./Dec.
	Cocido Y Crudo, essays by Dan Cameron et al, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid
1995	Linda Johnson Dougherty, Artist and the Community: Fred Wilson,Art Papers, Atlanta, Jan/Feb, pp. 36
	Calvin Reid, Caught in Flux, Transition, Oxford University Press, Spring, pp. 134-5
	Fred Wilson, Silent Messages, Museums Journal, May, pp. 27-9
	Curtia James, Remembering Old Salem (interview), Art Papers, Atlanta, July/August, pp. 28-31
	Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen, ed., Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances, New York: Dia Center for the Arts
	Howard Halle, Interview: Race Matters, Time Out New York, December 6-13
1996	Elizabeth Hess, Jemimas on My Mind, The Village Voice, January 2, pp. 66
	Roberta Smith, Art in Review: Fred Wilson, The New York Times, January 12, pp. C31
	Tony Whitfield, Fred Wilson: Mining the Memory, Sphere, Spring, pp. 17-8
	T. J. Demos, Fred Wilson , The New Art Examiner, March, pp. 42-3
	M. Franklin Sirmans, Fred Wilson , Artnews, March, pp. 116
	Kathleen Cromwell, Fred Wilson , Flash Art, May/June, pp. 114
	Jennifer Gonzalez, Fred Wilson, Frieze, May, pp. 62-3
	David Colman, Pretty on the Outside, George, June/July, pp. 117-8
	M. Franklin Sirmans, Fred Wilson , Artnews, March, pp. 116
	Peter von Ziegesar, Fred Wilson at Metro Pictures , Art in America, June, pp. 103-4
	Rob Perree, Fred Wilson: En Zijn Zwarte Landgenoten, Kunstbeeld, June pp. 31-3
	Fragments, Museu d'Art Contemporani, Barcelona
	New Histories, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
1997	Gilda Williams, Irredeemable Skeletons, Art Monthly, London, May, pp. 32-4
	Helen Sumpter, Objects of Desire, The Big Issue, April
	Anthony Vidler and Peter Wallen, Scene of the Crime, The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, Los Angeles
	David Barrett, Collected: Photographer's Gallery, London, Frieze, September/October, pp. 96-7
	Rachel Kent, Fred Wilson: The Fine Art of Subversion, Art Monthly (Australia), #98, April, pp. 18-9
	Allan M. Gordon, Fred Wilson at UC Davis, Artweek, June, pp. 21-2
1998	Barbara A. MacAdam, Fred Wilson, Artnews, March, pp. 167
	Postcards from Black America, Ed. by Rob Perée, Hedendaagse Afrikans Amerikaanse Kunst, The Netherlands
	Re-Presentation, essay by Christopher Young, Freedman Gallery, Albright College Center for the Arts, Reading, Pennsylvania
	Viewing the Invisble, essay by Rachel Kent, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne
1999	Michael Kimmelman,When Artists Dress Up Modern Jewish History, The New York Times, Feb. 26, pp. 37, 44
	Artforms, ed. by Duane Preble, Longman, New York, pp. 493, 494
	Insite97: Private Time In Public Space, essays by Susan Buck-Morss, Néster García Canclini, George E. Lewis, José Manuel Valenzuela Arce, Insite97, San Diego/Tijuana , pp. 22
	Trace:The International Exhibition, essay by Anthony Bond, The Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, pp. 154-6
	'They Thought It Was She' 1999, introduction by Emma Thomas, Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art
	The Museum As Muse, intro by Kynaston McShine, Museum of Modern Art, New York
2000	Pamela Newkirk, Object Lessons, ARTnews, Jan. pp. 156-9
	Kelly Klaasmeyer, Caution: Swoon Zone, Houston Press, April, pp. 71-2
	Kunstwelten Im Dialog Von Gauguin Zur Globalen Gegenwart (Global Art Rheinland 2000), intro by Fritz-Theo Mennincken, Museum Ludwig Koln, pp. 496-7
	Outbound: Passages from the 90's, introduction by Dana Friis-Hansen Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston
	Fred Wilson: Drawings & Maquettes For A Light Rail Station, Jersey City Museum, Jersey City
2001	Teaching Meaning in Artmaking, Sydney R. Walker, Davis Publications, Massachusetts, pp. 31-4
	Postmodernism, Eleanor Heartney, Tate Publishing, London, pp. 75
	Play's The Thing, Whitney Musuem of American Art, New York, pp. 26
	Art and Artifact-- The Museum as Medium, James Putnam, Thames & Hudson, London
	Jessica Dawson, The Dark Side of Museums, The Washington Post, November 8
	Unpacking Europe, Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi eds., Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands, pp. 426-31
	Museum as Subjects, The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan, pp. 46-7

Awards/Grants & Public Commissions:

1987	New York Foundation for the Arts, Fellowship in Sculpture
1990	New York State Council on the Arts
	National Endowment for the Arts, Inter-Arts/Artist Projects
1991	New York Foundation for the Arts, Fellowship in Sculpture
	Department of Cultural Affairs, Percent For Art Program: Townsend Harris High School public art commission
1992	Riverside South Public Art Commission, Public Park Project, New York
1993	American Association of Museums, Curators Committee Award
1994	National Endowment for the Arts, Fellowship in Sculpture
1995	The Winston-Salem Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the North Carolina Arts Council: Artist and the Community: Fred Wilson
	New Jersey Transit and New Jersey Council on the Arts
1999	John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

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Public Collections:

Baltimore Museum of Art

Denver Art Museum

Kresge Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing

Museum of Modern Art, New York

New School for Social Research

Seattle Art Museum

Whitney Museum of American Art

When Europe Slept

I planned to create a simple work on the aspects of Europe that were originally from somewhere else. I thought I would have only a few things to choose from, like spaghetti and gunpowder….As we looked deeper into the cultural, culinary and technologicäl history of Europe, it was astonishing how many things originated from elsewhere. It pointed to the Europeans ability to know a good idea when they see one. It was also surprising how much of a secret it had become.

The list seems endless…. With all the digging come even more layers yet to be unearthed…. I am not so interested in defining the historical record than sparking awareness ofthe inter-relationship ofthe world. I don't mind destabilizing parochial, narrow.:.minded notions ofwho can claim superiority and originality, in the process.

The title of my artwork, While Europe Slept, was taken from historical texts and artwork titles where they metaphorically speak of either Africa or the Americas. When you use it to describe Europe, its absurdity is laid bare. There are no somnambulant places in the world. Regions develop differently for different reasons. Those reasons are very much awake and have their own logic.

I ask rhetorically: if most Europeans have known that Europe has been such a cultural melting pot, how could there be a notion of the “exotic" (at best), or of ethnic hatred (at worst)? There are no “them” and “us” if “we” are “them.”

Fred Wilson

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FRED WILSON
Born in 1954 in the Bronx
Attended S.U.N.Y. College at Purchase, 1976, B.F.A.
Lives in New York City

Wilson has exhibited widely throughout the United States with solo exhibitions in the Indianapolis Museum of Art (1993), the Seattle Art Museum (1993), and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (1994); In 1993, Wilson represented the United states in the "Fourth International Cairo Biennial" in Egypt, participated in the "Whitney Biennial" at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and "Readymade Identities" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Important articles:

Donald Garfield, "Making the Museum Mine: An Interview with Fred Wilson," vol. 72, no. 3, May/June 1993

Judith E. Stein, "Sins of Omission," Art in America, October 1994, pp. 110-115

Martha Buskirk, "Interviews with Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, and Fred Wilson," October, vol. 70, 1994, pp. 109-112

"The museums don't know where to put me, because I'm not a registrar, I'm not a curator," says Wilson, the 38-year-old artist who has suddenly become a leading force in a new movement by museums to reexamine themselves, their past roles, and their present places in society.  "I'm just a person in the middle, outside the various systems museums have set up to run their institutions. ...I wouldn't say what I do with museums is a collaborative venture. But it isn't an antagonistic one either. Everyone who opens up to me becomes part of the project and feels it."

Between April 1992 and February of this year, 55,000 people experienced Wilson's remarkable exhibit, "Mining the Museum," at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore. What they saw shocked many of them: Wilson resurrected such long-hidden items as slave shackles and a whipping post, then displayed them in context with other, more conventional objects and art from the historical society's collections. The exhibit spoke volumes about the power of museums to influence community attitudes, both by what they show and do not show. And the ambiguous irony of the show's title speaks of the effect of Wilson's approach: not just to mine a collection like a deposit of ore, but also to lay a minefield of potentially explosive controversy. Or, perhaps closer to the artist's heart, to enable disenfranchised communities to at last call a part of the museum "mine."

"Etlinographic displays," says Wilson, "create a distance between cultures that doesn't need to be there. This difference cuts off any connections and flattens out the complexity of our relationship  in favor of exoticism. Even though I am not from the Third World, I felt myself both on display and not on display. When I was a museum guard I felt on display, but also invisible."

"I originally felt completely alien in that environment - which intrigued me. I wanted to know why, which is another reason I chose it. Before going in I had no idea what I was going to do.  I didn't know it was going to be African American history. I just wanted the paintings and objects to speak to me, let them tell me what I should do.  And they did. That is pretty much how I go about working with these institutions: I go in with no script, nothing whatsoever in my head. I try to get to know the community that the museum is in, the institution, the structure of the museum, the people in the museum from maintenance crew to the executive director. I ask them about the world, the museum, and their jobs, as well as the objects themselves. I look at the relationship between what is on view and what is not on view. I never know where that process will lead me, but it often leads me back to myself, to my own experiences."

(Donald Garfield, "Making the Museum Mine: An Interview with Fred Wilson," Museum News, vol. 72, no. 3, May/June 1993)

"Taken as a whole, 'Mining the Museum' raised the historical consciousness of all visitors and revealed to people of color how they have fared in the world of museums. Empowered as a curator, Wilson exposed the racist threads that are an integral part of our historical fabric, a reality often skirted in institutional contexts. Jolted by their visit, many viewers pondered why a historical society, in a city where eight out of ten residents are African-American, had never before done an exhibition about slavery and institutionalized racism."

(Judith E. Stein, "Sins of Omission," Art in America, October 1994, pp. 110-115)

"I've been asked if my work came from various theoretical discussions, but actually it didn't; it came from my experience in museums. Having worked as both a curator and an artist, there is a big difference between the two. With curating, the whole notion of irony is not involved, often for good reason-because the public in the museum space often expects some form of universal truth or knowledge, a notion I hold suspect. The fact that I'm an artist in an institution gives the viewer a certain leeway in how to respond to this work. All my work is extremely personal; In curating, that is forced more to the background because of the emphasis on so-called objective scholarship, which tends to make the viewers passive in their experience of the exhibition. I'm always trying to push the exhibitions farther than I would expect a museum curator to go."

"I have nothing against scholarship. It's important that, in my work, I'm not making grandiose claims from nowhere. But I do like the audience to think about scholarship in a more open way. In Mining the Museum I'm not trying to say that this is the history that you should be paying attention to. I'm just pointing out that, in an environment that supposedly has the history of Maryland, it's possible that there's another history that's not being talked about. It would be possible to do an exhibition about women's history, about Jewish history, about immigrant history based on looking at things in the collection. I chose African American and Native American information because that was impossible for me to overlook. But it was never to say that this was the history you had to be looking at. And certainly that exhibition was not about a straight black history. If I'd wanted to, I could have borrowed things from other museums around Maryland and around the country and made a more cohesive black history in the linear fashion, the way museums do. But that's not what I was trying to do. "

"In being a curator for a number of years, I honed this particular craft. Certain people like Broodthaers were doing work based on the museum, but I wasn't aware of it until later, so I really came to this from my experience. Even though I do consider myself a Conceptual artist, I also work totally from the visual -how the things relate to me, and how the environment that I'm in works with me. Every environment that I do is for me very much a visual relationship of objects, and how they are placed in the space."

"I am in many ways responding to the history of art and trying not to do what has been done before, which has a lot to do with notions of the exotic. If anything, I'm trying to expose that notion for what it is by showing things that are familiar and making people see them differently.What can you bring into a Museum now that wouldn't belong in a museum? There's basically nothing. So that whole approach is out the window. To me it's much more rigorous to look at the museum itself and to pull out relationships that are invisibly there and to make them visible. That, to me, is much more exciting."

(All quotes by the artist are from an interview by Martha Buskirk, October, vol. 70, 1994, pp. 109-112

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FRED WILSON

FEBRUARY 14 - MARCH 9, 1991

Fred Wilson's environmental tableaus and displays of "Third World" artifacts use enthnography as a deconstructive method to discuss contemporary issues of ethnocentrism in Western culture. Each display or tableau explores the aestheticization process artifacts are forced through once they are collected and displayed within a museum framework. Among the losses suffered by the artifact, as it enters into a Western ethnographic narrative, is the objects own cultural, personal and political history. These losses imposed upon the collected artifact are symptomatic of our culture's hegemony over others. Fred Wilson's work uses the very language of the dominant culture in order to re-instate the collected object's individual status wihin the ethnographic setting.

Several prominent sub-texts run throughout Wilson's work. There are displays which question our modes of collecting: A museum case displaying Pre-Columbian artifacts and cocaine paraphernalia comments on our often illegal manner of "importing" artwork to the U.S., equating the objects to contraband and the drive to collect to drug addiction. Partly crushed Assyrian Stelae from Iraq coupled with African Urns engage in a similar investigation but on more immediate terms; accompanying labels attribute their acquisition to 1991. The loss of the personal, which is always political, is another subject Wilson investigates; African marks, hung within an ethnographic framework, have the titles of various AIDS related opportunistic infections engraved upon their foreheads, a powerful reminder of the epidemic which is currently devastating Africa. Turn of the century Guatemalan pots similarly "weep," physically giving a voice to an artifact forced into silence, and commenting on the rise of both internal and external forces which dominate and destroy the lives and cultures of Central America's indigenous populations.

Juli Carson

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sechsteilige Serie
Siebdruck/Prägung
auf Aluminium