Fred Wilson by Marco de Rivera

Fred Wilson (b. 1954, Bronx, NY) has created site-specific installations in collaboration with numerous museums and cultural institutions throughout North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. He received his B.F.A. from the State University of New York, Purchase in 1976. Since his first solo exhibition in 1988, Wilson’s work has been the subject of many individual shows and retrospectives including the critically acclaimed Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson at The Contemporary and Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore (1992-93), and Fred Wilson: The Greeting Gallery, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (1999). In 2004, the solo exhibition Fred Wilson, Objects and Installations 1979–2000 concluded its three year tour, having traveled to eight different venues nationally, including the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, the Art Museum, University of Houston, the Santa Monica Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Chicago Cultural Center.



Wilson’s work has also been featured in over 100 group exhibitions, including the 50th Venice Biennale (2003) as the American representative, the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial Exhibition (1993), and the 4th International Cairo Bienniale (1992).



Wilson has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards. This year, Wilson was named to the Board of Trustees of the Whitney Museum of Art, New York. He received an Honorary Doctorate from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL in 2007. Wilson was awarded the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine in 2006. He was elected President of the Board of Trustees, The Sculpture Center, New York in 2002, and the same year was the recipient of the 10th Larry Aldrich Foundation Award. Wilson was also awarded the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, Chicago (1999), the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts awards (1990), and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture (1987 and 1991).



Fred Wilson’s work can be found in several public collections including: the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; the Birmingham Museum of Art; Denver Art Museum; The High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Institute of Jamaica, Kingston; The Jewish Museum, New York; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis; Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; Museum of Glass, Tacoma; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; the New School, New York; Seattle Art Museum; Studio Museum of Harlem, New York; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

The artist’s first solo exhibition at Pacewildenstein, Fred Wilson: My Echo, My Shadow, and Me was held at 32 East 57th Street, New York from March 11th through April 15th 2006.



Wilson recently mounted An Account of a Voyage to the Island Jamaica with the Un-Natural History of that Place at the Institute of Jamaica Gallery, Kingston, September 16, 2007–March 15, 2008. This installation was part of "Materialising Slavery: Art, Artefact, Memory and Identity," a four-part exhibition at the Museums Of History and Ethnography and the National Gallery of Jamaica. The exhibition was organized to coincide with the national and international events marking the bicentenary of the abolition of the trans-Atlantic African trade. Wilson's installation was a play on Hans Sloane's "A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, with the Natural History of the Herbs and Trees, Four-footed Beasts, Fishes, Birds, Insects, Reptiles, &c. Of the last of those ISLANDS," and explored the importance of the control of the natural world to colonization.
Fred Wilson by Marco de Rivera
Paris 201O


Fred Wilson currently lives and works in New York City.