Fred Wilson

Fred Wilson is a conceptual artist whose work investigates museological, cultural, and historical issues, which are largely overlooked or neglected by museums and cultural institutions. Since his groundbreaking exhibition Mining the Museum (1992) at the Maryland Historical Society, Wilson has been the subject of more than 40 solo exhibitions around the globe, including the retrospective Objects and Installations 1979-2000, which was organized by the Center for Art and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. His work has been exhibited extensively in museums including the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Allen Memorial Museum at Oberlin College, Ohio, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Institute of Jamaica, W.I., the Museum of World Cultures, Sweden, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, the British Museum, and the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne, Australia. 

His work can be found in several public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Long Museum, Shanghai, the Tate Modern in London and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. Most recently he presented his new exhibition Afro Kismet at the 2017 Istanbul Biennial, Turkey, which traveled to New York, Los Angeles and in 2020 to the Gibbes Museum in South Carolina. Since 2008 Wilson has been a member of the Board of Trustees at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He represented the U.S. at the Cairo Biennale (1992) and the Venice Biennale (2003). His many accolades include the prestigious MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius” Grant (1999), the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture (2006), the Ford Foundation’s Art of Change fellowship (2018) and Brandeis University’s Creative Arts Award (2019). 

^{photograph: Pace Gallery}