Fred Wilson

Since his first solo exhibition in 1988, Wilson has created site-specific installations in numerous museums and cultural institutions throughout North America, Europe and Asia. He has created new exhibition contexts, demonstrating how changes in context create changes in meaning and denouncing the manipulating interpretations of our cultural institutions, whose social, economic, and ideological power shape art and culture. In Mining the Museum (1992), he transformed the Baltimore Historical Society's collection in order to highlight the history of slavery in America. In 2003, when he represented the United States in the 50th Venice Biennale, he focused on the life of Africans in Venice from the fifteenth century to the present, creating a mixed-media installation, consisting of a suite of black glass sculpture, a black-and-white tiled room with wall graffiti from texts of African-American slave narratives, and a video installation of Othello projected backwards, thus addressing the racial, ethnic, and cultural issues historically related to social outcasts. He has represented the US at the Cairo Biennial (1992). His solo exhibition, Fred Wilson, Objects and Installations 1979-2000, traveled from 2001 to 2004 to eight national venues.