People gather at War Memorial Hall to hear Fred Wilson speak
The Dasha Shenkman Lecture in Contemporary Art celebrated its 10th anniversary on Wed. March 23, 2016, with guest speaker Fred Wilson coming to speak at the University of Guelph. This lecture series invites relevant artists to talk to students and faculty of the University of Guelph. Alumni from the arts program also visit to hear these artists speak. This year SOFAM invited Wilson, a celebrated American conceptual artist, who was featured at the Venice Bienniale in 2003. War Memorial Hall was packed, as people of all ages spilled in from surrounding cities to hear Wilson speak about his practice. As soon as he stepped up to the podium the audience began to listen intently as he cracked jokes and confidently spoke about his work. He entertained the audience with anecdotes surrounding his life as an emerging artist, and how he found his footing within the American art scene. He began his talk saying that he worked in both the Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
He said that he experienced these two places, “as an artist, [a] person of colour in the institution, and a visitor.”
Wilson said that he found these experiences to be drastically different, even though these two institutions were very similar, they presented ideas in very different ways. In his practice he began to explore these kinds of spaces and experiment with the different kinds of meaning created in these institutions.
He said in his talk, “So much meaning was put into these spaces, and was left so unexamined.”
Wilson guided the audience in his understanding of the complex space that a museum occupies. He presented serious topics of racism and the elite, but kept the mood light with his confidence and humour. When he was presenting one of his slides of a red velvet room he saw that the projector was making it a royal blue colour. A few more slides in he flipped his laptop around to prove to audience that he wasn’t crazy, it was actually red in real life, making everyone laugh.
So Wilson set out, with his humour and wit to guide him, to examine the meaning created in these institutional spaces and help other people in their process of examining their understanding of museums and art institutions.
He stopped using the work of other artists and started collecting objects from museum collections, in storage and on display, to create his exhibitions. He played with these art works and historical objects by changing labels to read “stolen from” instead of “acquired by,” totally changing the way we read objects on display.
Wilson says,“museums have a whole host of euphemisms for the messiness of history” and that’s why he pointedly changes the labels in his exhibitions.
In another project, he placed skeletons in vitrines then labelled them “Someone’s Brother” or “Someone’s Mother,” changing the way we look at these skeletons.
His most interesting piece was by far is work at the Maryland Historical Society, where he dove into their storage facilities and presented his version of the history of Maryland. He displayed three traditional busts of leaders he found in the museum then left three plinths empty labelling them with black historical figures born in Maryland who were nowhere to be found in storage. In another room he placed offensive wooden sculptures of Native people.
He asked someone at the historical society if he could get in touch with the Native community and they said, “Well there are no Indians in Maryland.”
After finding the Native community himself, Wilson collected family photos and displayed them with the wooden figures providing a juxtaposition of the stereotyped and the true Native population.
In this same show, he displayed beautiful old baby carriages complete with KKK hoods in them.
Wilson said he “saw the curator twisting her pearls” as she was looking at the baby carriages and she said, “‘Oh, you found the klan hoods.’”
He actually found the hood in textile storage as an anonymous donation. One of the people working at the historical society asked Wilson what they were to do when the school children came to visit because some of their families were in the klan. Thus proving Wilson’s work is necessary and relevant today.
Wilson said, “The horrors of history are in one museum and glories are in another.”
In his artistic practice he works to combine the horrors with the glories showing the complete history. Wilson works to show what institutions may not want us to see, like the KKK hoods. His talk was both informative and entertaining, Guelph was lucky to have him and he has left his audience with lots to think about!