Fred Wilson, whose first retrospective was presented by UMBC's Center for Art and Visual Culture in 2001, is representing the United States at this year's Venice Biennale, the leading international exhibition of contemporary art.
Earlier this year, Wilson also received a Distinguished Body of Work Award from the College Art Association for "Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations, 1979-2001," produced by CAVC and curated by Maurice Berger. CAA, the national professional association of visual artists and art institutions, presents the award annually to a single recipient.
A MacArthur Fellow, Wilson is well known internationally for works that address complex issues of race and ethnicity. No stranger to UMBC, he was part of three group exhibitions in the 1990's when CAVC was known as the Fine Arts Gallery, and has also presented three lectures on campus over the last decade.
As a result of the success of UMBC's exhibition, "Objects and Installations" is on a national tour through 2004 that includes Skidmore College, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Houston, Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Chicago Cultural Center. The New York Times selected the retrospective as one of the 2002-03 art season's highlights.
Through a variety of programs, including exhibitions, lectures, conferences, film series, and visiting and resident artist series, CAVC has established itself as an important venue for an ongoing dialogue about contemporary art and culture. The "Objects and Installations" exhibition and catalog played an important role in evaluating Wilson's work for the Biennale.
Maurice Berger, CAVC curator, says, "One major criterion for selection is a distinguished exhibition history. The retrospective -- for the first time -- comprehensively documented Fred's career. Since of most of his installations are ephemeral, created as they are for the individual institutions they critique, they easily could have been lost to history. The UMBC exhibition recovered these objects by documenting them through words and images, and made them once again available to museum visitors and readers of the catalog. No doubt, as Fred reminded me, the State Department and other interested parties took a long, hard look at the catalog when selecting artists for the Biennale. I'm delighted it served as a surrogate advocate for Fred.
"Were it not for the Center for Art and Visual Culture, the retrospective would not have happened -- at least not for a number of years," adds Berger. "The Center has led in this regard rather than followed. The UMBC community is amazing. I have never worked in such a generative and creative academic environment. I am always amazed at the willingness of my colleagues to take chances, to go out on a limb, to push the envelope. When David Yager, CAVC executive director, asked me in 1990 to work with the gallery, I could never have imagined the truly extraordinary collaborations that would follow. In just a decade -- as the amazing success of "Objects and Installations" affirms, the Center is considered a leader and a model in the world of university museums and galleries."
Symmes Gardner, CAVC director, says the Center's longstanding traveling exhibition programs and catalogs have been successful vehicles for getting the word out about CAVC and about UMBC. "With our major exhibition and publication initiatives, the CAVC has been able to reach a large number of diverse communities across the country. It shows a national audience that UMBC's commitment to research not only includes the arts but champions them as well."
