Untitled, 2001
Fred Wilson is renowned for his interdisciplinary practice that challenges assumptions of history, culture, race, and conventions of display. By reframing objects and cultural symbols,he alters traditional interpretations, encouraging viewers to reconsider social and historical narratives.
Wilson's early work was directed at marginalized histories, exploring how models ofcategorization, collecting, and display exemplify fraught ideologies and power relationsinscribed into the fabric of institutions. His groundbreaking and historically significantexhibition Mining the Museum (1992) at the Maryland Historical Society, radically altered thelandscape of museum exhibition narratives. As interventions, or "mining," of the museum'sarchive, Wilson re-presented its materials to make visible hidden structures built into themuseum system, and American Society as a whole.
At the onset of the twenty-first century, Wilson began to place more focus on his object-basedwork. In collaboration with the prominent American glass blower Dante Marioni, he began
producing his first glass artworks in 2001-ambiguous black-colored forms that assert amultifaceted political undercurrent. "The color black represents African American peoplebecause it's been placed on us as a representation," Wilson says. "Of course, the color black-the absence of light-really has nothing to do with African Americans. But there's a whole otherlayer of meaning."