Anne Wilson
Anne Wilson Professor, Department of Fiber and Material Studies, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
SELECTED MUSEUM COLLECTIONS
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA; The M.H. De Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, USA; The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, USA; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI, USA; Racine Art Museum, WI, USA; Knoxville Museum of Art, TN, USA; Museum of Glass, Tacoma, WA, USA; Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY, USA.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, USA; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, USA;
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK
RECOGNITION 2012
NASAD Citation in recognition of a distinguished career in the visual arts; Interview/Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art Oral History Program
My artwork evolves in a conceptual space where social and political ideas encounter the material processes of handwork and industry. Although my practice is interdisciplinary, the textile is core as both subject and process. Concept driven and research based, my work deeply acknowledges the histories of feminism, multiculturalism, and craft within a critical contemporary art discourse.
I explore aesthetic and conceptual relationships between textiles and the built environment, issues of labor and production, and social collaboration. Traditional fiber processes of stitch, crochet, knit, and weave are reinterpreted within sculptural installations, glass objects, performance art, video animations, and participatory community projects.
In recent performance works (Chicago, Houston, and Manchester, UK), I choreographed accumulations of repetitive actions relating to the weaving process. A critical foundation of this work is the performance of labor as a meditation on the complex subject of textile production today. As well, the glass objects comprising the installation (to weave, to wind, to knot, to knit, to twist, to push, to pack, to press) reference the infrastructure of making itself through the tools of production.