38. Fred Wilson; Artist

Описание: 38. Fred Wilson; Artist
Fred Wilson is the Keynote Speaker of day 1 of the 28th James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art .
FRED WILSON IS poring over reams of paper – printed inventories of objects from the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology's collection – for his new installation, Aftermath. With a sly, knowing smile on his round face, which is framed by a pair of red spectacles, a bushy beard, and gray-frosted hair, he gives the impression of being a slightly devious archaeologist. The objects he's digging for are sometimes familiar but often hidden to the world. The site he's mined for decades is the museum.
In the past the finds he's pulled from the dusty closets of institutional archives, from Italy to Chicago to New York to Maryland, have included a Ku Klux Klan hood, which he playfully/shockingly placed inside a baby stroller from the same period, or "mammy" and "pappy" figurines gathered from the flea-market collectors' circuit, which he smashed to pieces while being videotaped, only to later reconfigure the wreckage into a baseball bat.
Wilson's genius is the ability to walk the line between horror and humor without giving up his right to either. His witty provocations are salient gifts to contented museum crowds – commentaries that offer viewers a chance to reflect on the deep politics and racist conventions behind the displays on the walls. You could call it corrective, but Wilson has described his practice of creative rearrangement as a "trompe l'oeil of curating."
The day I visit him, what the 1999 MacArthur "genius" grant-winning artist is curating is war and the cultural effects of it. He's taking notes on a variety of objects that may have been left behind in the rubble of conflict: an African mask, with a beard of raffia and used bullet casings, from Liberia, 1963; a broken Mesopotamian tablet inscribed with cuneiform markings; a white marble head severed from the body of an ancient Greek sculpture, set cheek-to-platform in an irreverent position of repose; and a toy truck assembled from scavenged, dented gray sheet metal, its wheels made of tin cans of the size usually reserved for cat food. Each of these objects is laid out on a long, low platform surrounded by a barrier wall that suggests, in elegant museum exhibition-design terms, an archaeological site in the midst of an excavation. It's Wilson's latest art installation in progress, commissioned by the UC Berkeley Art Museum (BAM) to complement a survey exhibition of 21 years of Wilson's work.
http://www.art.howard.edu/portercollo...
http://www.art.howard.edu/
Gwendolyn H. Everett, Ph.D,
Associate Dean
Director, Gallery of Art
Division of Fine Arts,
Howard University Department of Art
Howard University,
Dr. Tony McEachern
Chairman, Department of Art Howard University,
http://www.art.howard.edu,
28th JAPC,
Dr. Floyd Coleman, Founder of JAPC,
Dr. David C. Driskell, The David C. Driskell Center, University of Maryland,
Dr. Olivia Drake,
Wilbur Allen