Fred Wilson

The subject of Fred Wilson's work is museums. To date he has worked with more than 20 institutions, rearranging and reinterpreting their collections to reveal hidden biases and ideologies. Institutions, by definition, resist change. Too often they become indifferent to changing cultural atti-tudes, especially regarding race, gender and class. Wilson clears away the cobwebs and helps museums and museum visitors alike see artworks in a different light. Before he established his artistic practice, Wilson had worked as a freelance educator in various museums in New York, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History. He noted an enormous disparity in the way museums in particular presented artworks—from the color they painted the gallery walls and how they illuminated the objects, to the manner in which they described and interpreted works on labels and text panels.