Keith Wilson (artist)

Last updated
Keith Wilson
Born
Birmingham, United Kingdom
Education Ruskin School of Art at Oxford University (BFA), Slade School of Art, University College London
Known forSculpture, installation art, conceptual art, arts administration
Notable workPuddle, Steles (Waterworks), Sign for Art (Stelae 2014), Park Hill Plinths
Website keithwilsonstudio.com
Keith Wilson Print.jpg

Keith Wilson is an artist, curator, educator, and cultural producer whose work spans sculpture, printmaking, participatory installation, and international exhibition making. Wilson received international notoriety in the late 1990s for his Puddle sculpture, [1] and subsequently for Steles (Waterworks) sculptural installation, commissioned for the 2012 London Olympics, [2] as well as for co-curating the exhibition Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy of Arts. [3]

Contents

Biography

Born in Birmingham, UK in 1965, Wilson studied art at the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford University from 1985 to 1988, and received his MFA from the Slade School of Art, University College London in 1990. Wilson won a Boise Travel Award in 1990 and a LAB Individual Artist Award in 1994. [4] From 2017 to 2022, Wilson served as the director of the Center for the Humanities at the City University of New York Graduate Center, [5] where he oversaw numerous cultural programs, including an international collaboration with Wellcome Trust. Wilson is a research professor in sculpture at Sheffield Hallam University, in Sheffield, UK. [6]

Artwork and curatorial projects

Wilson's public art projects include landscape-scaled abstract sculptures, which are a contemporary interpretation of the ancient steles form of monument. In 2012, Wilson was commissioned to create Steles (Waterworks) for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park on the occasion of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. The artwork consists of thirty-five chromatic steles along the WaterWorks River. [7] [2] Wilson stated that "These sculptures stand ready to serve old functions in a new way. They connect the parkland with the river, the canal and by extension the wider world. They provide a sense of place and occasion, anchoring memories of many a good day out. These colourful totems will help create a distinctive identity for this newest and boldest of London parks." [8] Wilson's other notable steles include Sign for Art (Stelae 2014) on the campus of the University of Leeds, [9] and Park Hill Plinths located in the Park Hill Estates housing development in Sheffield, United Kingdom. [10]

Wilson's curatorial projects include the exhibition Modern British Sculpture, which he co-curated with Penelope Curtis at the Royal Academy in 2011. The exhibition featured a selection of mainly abstract and conceptual sculpture from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and placed a focus on sculpture's long history of doing public work. [3] In 2010, Wilson produced Things, an exhibition that opened with an empty museum collection, displaying objects contributed by members of the public through the period of exhibition. The exhibition was a collaboration with Wellcome Collection, and was their first public material gathering project. [11] Things was first exhibited in 2010 at the Wellcome Collection, and re-imagined for the exhibition Calendar at the MAC Belfast in 2016. Things was the impetus for Wilson's next curatorial endeavor titled, The Object Library, which he developed while directing the Center for the Humanities at the City University of New York Graduate Center. The Object Library consisted of a collection of community-donated cultural items that Wilson notes, “point to other ways we can learn about the world.” The installation was located on the first floor of Mina Rees Library at The Graduate Center, CUNY from 2017 through 2020, where objects took the place of books. [12]

Museum and public collections

Wilson's abstract steles are permanently installed in several locations in the United Kingdom. Steles (Waterworks) is situated along the waterway that runs through the central section of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. [2] His 2014 stele, Sign for Art (Stelae 2014), is publicly displayed in the center of Beech Grove Plaza on the campus of the University of Leeds. Sign for Art (Stelae 2014) is made from black polyurethane elastomer and references Wilson's experiences teaching art to visually and hearing impaired adults in the 1980s. [9] The sculpture's two squiggly forms reference Wilson's tactile form of teaching. He initially ‘drew’ the two spaced lines across a student's forehead to signify a brushstroke. Wilson recalls that “this modification of the British Sign Language, presumably derived from the making of a brushstroke, struck home and stayed with me.” [13] [14]

Publications

Wilson and Penelope Curtis co-edited and authored Modern British Sculpture , published in 2011 by Royal Academy Books.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Science Museum, London</span> Museum in Kensington, London

The Science Museum is a major museum on Exhibition Road in South Kensington, London. It was founded in 1857 and is one of the city's major tourist attractions, attracting 3.3 million visitors annually in 2019.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Curator</span> Content specialist charged with managing an institutions collections

A curator is a manager or overseer. When working with cultural organizations, a curator is typically a "collections curator" or an "exhibitions curator", and has multifaceted tasks dependent on the particular institution and its mission. The term "curator" may designate the head of any given division, not limited to museums. Curator roles include "community curators", "literary curators", "digital curators" and "biocurators".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stele</span> Stone or wooden slab erected as a marker

A stele, or occasionally stela, when derived from Latin, is a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected in the ancient world as a monument. The surface of the stele often has text, ornamentation, or both. These may be inscribed, carved in relief, or painted.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carnegie Museum of Art</span> Art museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

The Carnegie Museum of Art is an art museum in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The museum was originally known as the Department of Fine Arts, Carnegie Institute and was formerly located at what is now the Main Branch of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. The museum's first gallery was opened for public use on November 5, 1895. Over the years, the gallery vastly increased in size, with a new building on Forbes Avenue built in 1907. In 1963, the name was officially changed to Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute. The size of the gallery has tripled over time, and it was officially renamed in 1986 to "Carnegie Museum of Art" to indicate it clearly as one of the four Carnegie Museums.

Events from the year 1984 in art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Archaeological Museum, Athens</span> National museum in Athens, Greece

The National Archaeological Museum in Athens houses some of the most important artifacts from a variety of archaeological locations around Greece from prehistory to late antiquity. It is considered one of the greatest museums in the world and contains the richest collection of Greek Antiquity artifacts worldwide. It is situated in the Exarcheia area in central Athens between Epirus Street, Bouboulinas Street and Tositsas Street while its entrance is on the Patission Street adjacent to the historical building of the Athens Polytechnic university.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Driskell</span> American painter, scholar, and curator (1931–2020)

David C. Driskell was an American artist, scholar and curator; recognized for his work in establishing African-American Art as a distinct field of study. In his lifetime, Driskell was cited as one of the world's leading authorities on the subject of African-American Art. Driskell held the title of Distinguished University Professor of Art, Emeritus, at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Lowery Stokes Sims is an American art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art known for her expertise in the work of African, African American, Latinx, Native and Asian American artists such as Wifredo Lam, Fritz Scholder, Romare Bearden, Joyce J. Scott and others. She served on the curatorial staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museum of Arts and Design. She has frequently served as a guest curator, lectured internationally and published extensively, and has received many public appointments. Sims was featured in the 2010 documentary film !Women Art Revolution.

Sheffield, England, has a large population of amateur, working and professional visual artists and artworks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leeds City Museum</span> Museum in West Yorkshire, England

Leeds City Museum, originally established in 1819, reopened in 2008 in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. It is housed in the former Mechanics' Institute built by Cuthbert Brodrick, in Cookridge Street. It is one of nine sites in the Leeds Museums & Galleries group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Waterworks River</span>

Waterworks River is a river, at one time a tidal river, in the London Borough of Newham, one of the Bow Back Rivers that flow into the Bow Creek part of the River Lea, which in turn flows into the River Thames.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alison Wilding</span> English artist

Alison Mary Wilding OBE, RA is an English artist noted for her multimedia abstract sculptures. Wilding's work has been displayed in galleries internationally.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cantor Arts Center</span> Art museum in Stanford, California

The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, formerly the Stanford University Museum of Art, and commonly known as the Cantor Arts Center, is an art museum on the campus of Stanford University in Stanford, California. The museum first opened in 1894 and consists of over 130,000 sq ft (12,000 m2) of exhibition space, including sculpture gardens. The Cantor Arts Center houses the largest collection of sculptures by Auguste Rodin outside of Paris and the Soumaya Museum in Mexico City, with 199 works, most in bronze but others in different media. The museum is open to the public and charges no admission.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">African art in Western collections</span> History of African art in Western collections

Some African objects had been collected by Europeans for centuries, and there had been industries producing some types, especially carvings in ivory, for European markets in some coastal regions. Between 1890 and 1918 the volume of objects greatly increased as Western colonial expansion in Africa led to the removal of many pieces of sub-Saharan African art that were subsequently brought to Europe and displayed. These objects entered the collections of natural history museums, art museums and private collections in Europe and the United States. About 90% of Africa's cultural heritage is believed to be located in Europe, according to French art historians.

Joyce J. Scott is an African-American artist, sculptor, quilter, performance artist, installation artist, print-maker, lecturer and educator. Named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016, and a Smithsonian Visionary Artist in 2019, Scott is best known for her figurative sculptures and jewelry using free form, off-loom beadweaving techniques, similar to a peyote stitch. Each piece is often constructed using thousands of glass seed beads or pony beads, and sometimes other found objects or materials such as glass, quilting and leather. In 2018, she was hailed for working in new medium — a mixture of soil, clay, straw, and cement — for a sculpture meant to disintegrate and return to the earth. Scott is influenced by a variety of diverse cultures, including Native American and African traditions, Mexican, Czech, and Russian beadwork, illustration and comic books, and pop culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Penelope Curtis</span> British art historian and curator

Penelope Curtis is a British art historian and curator. Fom 2015 to 2020 she was the director of Lisbon's Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, and from 2010 to 2015 director of Tate Britain. She is the author of several monographs on sculpture and has written widely at the invitation of contemporary artists.

Lisa Le Feuvre is a curator, writer, editor and public speaker. In 2017 she was appointed the inaugural Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, an artist endowed foundation that aims to continue the creative and investigative legacies of the artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tim Tate</span> American artist and the co-founder of the Washington Glass School

Tim Tate is an American artist and the co-founder of the Washington Glass School in the Greater Washington, DC capital area. The school was founded in 2001 and is now the second largest warm glass school in the United States. Tate was diagnosed as HIV positive in 1989 and was told that he had a year left to live. As a result, Tate decided to begin working with glass in order to leave a legacy behind. Over a decade ago, Tate began incorporating video and embedded electronics into his glass sculptures, thus becoming one of the first artists to migrate and integrate the relatively new form of video art into sculptural works. In 2019 he was selected to represent the United States at the sixth edition of the GLASSTRESS exhibition at the Venice Biennale.

Terence Frederick Friedman (1940-2013) was an American-born art and architectural historian and museum curator. After his death in Leeds, UK, The Sculpture Journal, in their tribute, defined him as ‘a rare being - a scholar curator working in a regional museum, and an outstanding art historian, educator and collector’. He was also a highly acclaimed author and respected as a leading authority on 18th century ecclesiastical architecture. His book, The Eighteenth-Century Church in Britain, the first substantial study of the subject to appear in over half a century, won the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History in 2012.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kernosivsky idol</span> Ukrainian artifact

The Kernosivskyi idol, or Kernosivsky idol is a Kurgan stele dating from the mid–3rd millennium BC. It was discovered in 1973 in the village of Kernosivka, in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Ukraine. It is held in the collection of the Dmytro Yavornytsky National Historical Museum of Dnipro.

References

  1. Sawyer, Miranda (1999-09-11). "Wet dreams". The Guardian. Retrieved 2022-11-19.
  2. 1 2 3 "Olympic Art Gets Its First Draw". HuffPost UK. 2012-02-15. Retrieved 2022-11-19.
  3. 1 2 Morton, Tom (2011-04-01). "Modern British Sculpture". Frieze. No. 138. ISSN   0962-0672 . Retrieved 2022-11-19.
  4. Buckman, David (2006). Artists in Britain Since 1945 (2nd ed.). United Kingdom: Sansom & Company. ISBN   978-0-953260-95-9.
  5. "Keith Wilson Faculty Profile". The Center for the Humanities. Retrieved 2022-11-19.
  6. "Keith Wilson Faculty Profile". Sheffield Hallam University.
  7. Cooke, Sonia van Gilder (2012-07-26). "'Steles' | The Quirky Art of Britain's Cultural Olympiad". Time. ISSN   0040-781X . Retrieved 2022-11-19.
  8. "London 2012: Wilson's Steles crayons in Olympic river". BBC News. 2012-02-14. Retrieved 2022-11-19.
  9. 1 2 "A Sign for Art, A Time for Unveiling". University of Leeds. 2014-03-10.
  10. "Park Hill set to launch permanent sculpture park this September". Exposed Magazine. 2017-09-05. Retrieved 2022-11-19.
  11. "Wellcome Collection to exhibit everyday objects in Things show". Design Week. 2010-09-01. Retrieved 2022-11-19.
  12. Dorris, Jesse (2019-02-13). "CUNY's Keith Wilson and Artist Richard Woods Offer Object Lesson in New York City". Interior Design. Retrieved 2022-11-19.
  13. "Sign for Art (Stelae 2014) - Library | University of Leeds". explore.library.leeds.ac.uk. Retrieved 2022-11-19.
  14. "Professor Keith Wilson's Latest Artwork Revealed at the University of Leeds". The CCRI Impact Blog. 2014-10-06. Retrieved 2022-11-19.