Visual Arts Alumna Paula Wilson '05 in Solo Exhibition at Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum
Since mid-summer, and continuing on until December 30, 2023, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College has featured the colorful and poignantly discursive work of Visual Arts alumna Paula Wilson ’05. The solo exhibition, titled, Paula Wilson: Toward the Sky’s Back Door, spans the artist’s work from 2007 to 2023 and features pieces ranging from lithography to sculpture.
The exhibition seeks to make inroads for rigorous engagement with a wide variety of artistic mediums, techniques, and approaches to art. Present in Paula Wilson: Toward the Sky’s Back Door are paintings, prints, collages, video, and sculpture, many of which Wilson interweaves to investigate the “polarities of human life, including her own identity as a biracial woman and her experiences living in both major metropolises and the small desert railroad town of Carrizozo, New Mexico.”
To stand before any of Wilson’s works is to be asked to engage in questions both material and societal, making Wilson’s oeuvre, which “challenges the separations between art and everyday living,” especially suited for the teaching museum’s aim.
On September 20, 2023, Wilson will join Skidmore Associate Professor of Theater and Department Chair Lisa Jackson-Schebetta for a conversation about artistic practice and modes of engagement.
Paula Wilson (b. 1975) is a mixed media artist who employs sculpture, collage, painting, printmaking and installation to examine women’s identities through the lens of cultural history. Wilson received a BFA from Washington University in 1998 and a MFA from Columbia University in 2005. She has had one-person exhibitions at 516 Arts, Albuquerque, NM; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY; and Galleria Suzy Shammah in Milan, Italy. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland; Sikkema Jenkins & Co., NY; Fred Snitzer Gallery, Miami; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, among others. Wilson has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Giverny Residency from the Art Production Fund in Giverny, France.
View Gallery:
Installation view, Paula Wilson: Toward the Sky's Back Door, Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, 2023. Photo by Mindy McDaniel, courtesy Tang Teaching Museum
Paula Wilson '05 works with assistants Kelsey Renko (left) and Laura Frare (right) to paint a newly designed site-specific mural for the exhibition Paula Wilson: Toward the Sky's Back Door, at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College. Photo by Shawn Lachapelle, courtesy Tang Teaching Museum.
Paula Wilson '05 examines a new site-specific monumental mixed-media painting during the installation of the exhibition Paula Wilson: Toward the Sky's Back Door, at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College.