Contemporary Conversations: Artistic Practice in Response to the Present — Paula Wilson
Event Overview
Dates
Thursday, October 1, 2020
Hours
5:30 PM (EDT)
Admission
FREE; registration required
Multimedia artist Paula Wilson’s densely layered, colorful, and often monumental works bring together a variety of painting, collage, filmic, installation, and print techniques. As a black biracial woman born in Chicago, IL and living in the American desert, Wilson’s multifaceted work resists a singular viewpoint. Her dense layering of color, image, pattern, and materials acts as a visual metaphor for the complex stratum of histories and cultures, both real and imagined. Join the artist, along with Mitra Abbaspour, Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Princeton University Art Museum, for a conversation about her process, her interest in mythology, nature, race as inspiration in her work, and the artist residencies she co-founded in Carrizozo, New Mexico. With an introduction by Martha Friedman, Director of the Program in Visual Arts. Part of the series “Contemporary Conversations: Artistic Practice in Response to the Present,” a partnership between the Art Museum and the Lewis Center for the Arts.
JOIN THE EVENT
The conversation is free and open to the public. Presented on Zoom Webinar; registration required.
This event will include live closed captions in both English and Spanish. English captions are available directly in the Zoom toolbar by clicking the “CC” icon. To access Spanish-language captioning, open Streamtext, where you can select “Spanish” to see the live captioning.
(Para acceder a los subtítulos en varios idiomas, ingrese al seminario web de Zoom durante un evento en vivo, luego abra un navegador web separado para visitar esta página donde puede seleccionar” español “o el idioma de su elección.)
If you are in need of access accommodations in order to participate in this event, please contact the Lewis Center at 609-258-5262 or email LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least 2 weeks in advance of the event date.
Spanish-language live closed-captioning for this program is made possible by the Rapid Response Magic Project of the Princeton University Humanities Council.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Visual artist Paula Wilson. Photo by Angie Rizzo.
PAULA WILSON is a multimedia artist whose densely layered, colorful, and often monumental works utilize a variety of painting, collage, filmic, installation, and print techniques. As a black biracial woman born in Chicago, Illinois, and living in the American desert, Wilson’s multifaceted work resists a singular viewpoint. Her dense layering of color, image, pattern, and materials acts as a visual metaphor for the complex stratum of histories and cultures, both real and imagined. Explorations of myth, race, and the natural world inform her work. Based in Carrizozo, New Mexico, Wilson is co-founder of the artist organizations MoMAZoZo and the Carrizozo Artist in Residency (AIR). She is a recent recipient of a Princeton Hodder grant for Fall 2020.
Photo courtesy Princeton University Art Museum
MITRA ABBASPOUR joined the Princeton University Art Museum in 2016. She previously served as an Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art and an Assistant Curator at the California Museum of Photography, in addition to having served as a guest curator for a number of exhibitions at various institutions. Exhibitions she has curated or co-curated at the Museum include Helen Frankenthaler Prints: Seven Types of Ambiguity (2019), Frank Stella Unbound: Literature and Printmaking (2018), Making History Visible: Of American Myths and National Heroes (2017) and, selections of previous work includes, Re-Orientations: Islamic Art and the West in the 18th and 19th Centuries (2008), Lori Nix: Some Other Place (2003-04) One Ground: 4 Palestinian & 4 Israeli Filmmakers (2003), and Common Borders: Casa Blanca, Riverside and La Frontera (2002).
At MoMA, she led the curatorial branch of an interdisciplinary research initiative that resulted in the print and digital publications Object : Photo: Modern Photographs 1909-1945. She has authored numerous essays on contemporary artists in this field, most recently contributing to monographs of Reza Aramesh, Lalla Essaydi, Dor Guez, Hassan Hajjaj, and Shirin Neshat and has also taught courses both in her specialization, the modern and contemporary Middle East and, general area specializations—Islamic art, modern art, and the history of photography—at The Cooper Union, Hunter College, and Brooklyn College.
Photo by Paola Ferrario/Art in America
MARTHA FRIEDMAN is a New York-based sculptor who works with solid and plastic materials to form, deform and test the boundaries of the physical world. Often building towering sculptures out of unstable materials, interjected with malleable elements, the works are infused with a sense of subverted ambition, precariousness, irony, and humor. Friedman’s recent works have included collaborations with choreographers and dancers Susan Marshall and Silas Riener, extending her work into a visceral and flexible dimension, exploring material sculpture, the human body, and the relationships that can exist between the two.
Friedman began teaching at Princeton in 2009, and was appointed full time Lecturer in 2011. Friedman served as Acting Director of the Visual Arts Program 2013-14, and was appointed Director of the Program in July 2017. She teaches introductory and advanced sculpture courses, and the program seminars for majors, providing foundation for their thesis projects. With Susan Marshall, Friedman has twice co-taught “Body as Object”, an innovative course on the intersection of sculpture and dance. Friedman has previously taught at institutions including Cooper Union, Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, Wesleyan University, and Yale University.
Friedman’s work has been reviewed in publications including Art in America, Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Modern Painters, Hyperallergic and others. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at The Henry Museum, Seattle, WA (2018-2019), The Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York (2017); Institute of Fine Arts New York University, New York (2016-17); Locust Projects, Miami (2015-16); Wallspace, New York (2012, 2009, 2007); the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, MI (2010); DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA (2010); and Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, IL (2010). Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, nationally and internationally. Select examples include Frieze New York Sculpture Park, curated by Tom Eccles, New York; Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem, Israel Museo D’Arte Contemporanea Roma, Rome; and The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow. A solo exhibition of Friedman’s work is forthcoming at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco.
Born in Detroit, Friedman earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998 and her MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2003. Friedman lives and works in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
