Anne Wilson (born 1949) is a Chicago-based visual artist. Wilson creates sculpture, drawings, Internet projects, photography, performance, and DVD stop motion animations employing table linens, bed sheets, human hair, lace, thread and wire. Her work extends the traditional processes of fiber art (techniques such as stitching, crocheting, and knitting) to other media.[1] Wilson is a professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.[2][3]
Life and work
Anne Wilson, A Chronicle of Days, 1997-98. Collection 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan
Anne Wilson was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1949. At 15, she attended George School, a Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania, where she received training in feminist theory and the philosophies of passive resistance through the study of Gandhi's teachings on non-violent politics. In her later research, Wilson remarked that her lessons at George School, especially Gandhi's exhortation to all Indians that they must practice spinning—for social, political, economic and spiritual reasons—profoundly influenced her life and artistic practice.[4]
Anne Wilson's artwork explores personal and public practices of ritual and social systems, ideas of de-construction and re-construction in both microcosmic and macrocosmic worlds of public and private architecture, as well as themes of time and loss.[5]
Wilson received a B.F.A. from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and a M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts (CCA) where she pursued interdisciplinary studies in the visual arts. At CCA, Wilson developed an understanding of art within a cultural context, a way of thinking emphasized by CCA instructor, art historian and anthropologist Dr. Ruth Boyer. Subsequently, Wilson's graduate research focused on temporary textile architecture such as the Zulu indlu and the Sub-Saharan African black tent. For Wilson these interests intersected with the popular concerns of generative systems, such as the methods being pioneered by artist Buckminster Fuller.[6] During this time, Wilson was also influenced by the international art fabric movement, including artists such as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Ritzi and Peter Jacobi, Olga de Amaral, and Ed Rossbach.
During the 1970s while living in Berkeley, California, Wilson argued for the contemporary relevance of fiber and textile processes alongside more conventional fine art materials and techniques. Wilson began using hair as a fiber material in place of thread in 1988. Her works such as Hair Work[7] and A Chronicle of Days[8] consist of daily stitching where the artist "stained" clean white scraps of cloth with small patches of hair-based needlework. Wilson began inviting audience participation with her project Hairinquiry (1996–1999). Hairinquiry collected responses to the questions: How does it feel to lose your hair? What does it mean to cut your hair? The project was later archived through an online website.[9][10][11]
In 2002, Wilson began the series Topologies (2002-ongoing) at the Whitney Museum of American Art's Biennial exhibition. In Topologies, expansive networks of found black lace are deconstructed to create large horizontal topographies. Some of the structures are formed by Wilson from computer-mediated scans of lace fragments that are manipulated and re-materialized by hand stitching. The form of Topologies is inspired by forms of physical and electronic networks, city structures, immateriality, biology and the urban sprawl.[9][12][13]
In 2010, Wilson produced one of her most ambitious installations at the Knoxville Museum of Art in East Tennessee. Local Industry, a central component of the exhibition Anne Wilson: Wind/Rewind/Weave, was a site-specific installation as a collaborative "textile factory".[14] From January 22 through April 25, 2010, visitors to the Knoxville Museum of Art worked together to produce a bolt of cloth. Wilson conceived of Wind/Rewind/Weave as a meditation on labor, acknowledging the specific geographic location of the Knoxville Museum of Art in the historical heartland of both hand weaving traditions and textile mill production in the United States. The Local Industry cloth, 75.9 feet (23.1 m) long, was on display at the Knoxville Museum of Art in 2011.[15]
Also related to textile production in content, Wilson has choreographed 4 thread walking performances, conceptual movement works based upon weaving (Wind-Up: Walking the Warp Chicago, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, 2008; Wind-Up: Walking the Warp Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2010; Walking the Warp Manchester, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, England, 2012; and To Cross (Walking New York), The Drawing Center, New York, 2014). In all her performances, Wilson is working through direct physical participation to think about time, labor, art, and cultural production.
Wilson continues her hair and cloth-works practice, alongside the creation of horizontal topographies, installations, and performances. New works were included in her solo exhibition, Dispersions, at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery in 2013, and Fiber: Sculpture 1960-Present originating at the ICA Boston in 2014. In 2015-16 her work was included in Pathmakers: Women in Art, Craft and Design, Midcentury and Today originating at the Museum of Arts and Design in NYC, and Art_Textiles at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, England. In 2016 she opened a solo exhibition at the James Harris Gallery in Seattle.[16][17][18]
Exhibitions
Anne Wilson, Dispersions (installation), 2013, thread, hair, cloth, white frames. Rhona Hoffman Gallery, ChicagoAnne Wilson, Rewinds, 2010, glass. Rhona Hoffman Gallery, ChicagoAnne Wilson, Rewinds, 2010, glass.Anne Wilson, To Cross Walking New York, 2014, performance and sculpture. The Drawing Center (photo: Angeli Sion)Anne Wilson, Walking the Warp Houston, 2010, performance and sculpture. Contemporary Arts Museum HoustonAnne Wilson, Walking the Warp Manchester, 2012, performance. Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UKAnne Wilson, Local Industry, 2010, performance and production. Knoxville Museum of ArtAnne Wilson, Local Industry Cloth, 2010, performance and production.Anne Wilson: Wind/Rewind/Weave (exhibition catalog)
2016
Anne Wilson: Drawings and Objects, James Harris Gallery, Seattle, WA (solo)
Adamson, Glenn and Bryan-Wilson, Julia. Art in the Making: Artists and their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing. London: Thames & Hudson, 2016, back cover photo and pp. 218–220.
Harris, Jennifer (editor/curator), Art_Textiles, (exhibit catalog, essay by Pennina Barnett, "Cloth, Memory and Loss"), The Whitworth, The University of Manchester, UK, 2015, pp. 10, 24-31, 84-85
Ferris, Alison and Patterson, Karen. Toward Textiles. (exhibit catalog) Sheboygan, WI: John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 2015, cover image and p. 5.
Vinebaum, Lisa. "Performing Globalization in the Textile Industry: Anne Wilson and Mandy Cano Villalobos," The Handbook of Textile Culture (anthology). Janis Jefferies, Diana Wood Conroy, and Hazel Clark, eds., London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, Chapter 11, pp, 169-185.
Taft, Maggie. ARTFORUM, January 2014, Vol. 52, No. 5., "Anne Wilson" at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, (review), p. 217
Ollman, Leah. Art in America, December 2014,"Thread Lines" Drawing Center, (review), p. 149.
^In the October 2008 issue of Art in America corresponding editor Susan Snodgrass wrote: "Anne Wilson's evocative, highly individual practice applies traditional textile processes to other mediums, creating hybrid works that combine elements of sculpture, installation, and drawing."
