Magnolia Wilkinson ’24 on her Senior Visual Arts Exhibition, Reproduction Production

By Kirstin Ohrt
Department of Art & Archaeology

Magnolia smiles and folds her hands, standing in a gallery with her artwork behind her

Magnolia Wilkinson ’24 at her senior exhibition Reproduction Production. Photo by Kirstin Ohrt

“The more I think about the phrase ‘Reproduction Production’—or vice versa” said senior Practice of Art major Magnolia Wilkinson, “the more I realize that it has all of these connotations that line up so well with the kind of art that I make and the way I think about art.” In some ways, this name Wilkinson gave her senior exhibition has been waiting in the wings all of her life. With an embryologist mother and video production father, “my parents have always said ‘she works in reproduction and he works in production,’” she said, “or vice versa.”

The exhibition braids together themes of gender roles, reproductive rights, abuse, resilience, and self-exploration. But central to the exhibition is childhood, in both personal and general scope. Closest to the gallery entrance, Baptism (in the name of) situates the show in both regards, introducing the viewer through quilted text to her exhibition, personified as a daughter. “I’ve made this show through my labor and I’m doing the act of production and reproduction,” Wilkinson said. “I’m the artist and this is my art—but I’m also a mother and this is my child.” She wrestles with the question of what an ideal childhood looks like, who is privileged to experience it that way, and what it looks like for everybody else.

Wilkinson spreads the bright hues and pinks and blues traditionally associated with childhood across her works using crochet, collaged installations, and fabrics worked into a collection of quilts as well as around a colorful super-scaled hanger suspended from the center of the ceiling. Titled Mrs. Blessed to be Here, the hanger represents the nuanced fight for reproductive rights, the gendering of domestic work, and her own sense that she is “blessed to be taking up space at Princeton.”

Exhibition Video Tour with Magnolia Wilkinson

Strikingly absent of color is the work Death Toll, an assembly of 31,920 crocheted stitches that Wilkinson worked on for over thirty hours to memorialize Palestinian loss of life in the war in Gaza. “I would have felt really disappointed in myself if I had a big room in a nice new shiny building for two weeks at Princeton during this incredibly important moment in the world and I didn’t say anything at all,” she said.

Though she weaves elements of her own childhood through the exhibition—both its joyful elements, compliments of her loving parents, as well as its brevity as a result of assault—Wilkinson appreciates the unpredictable expanse of the conversations her exhibition might inspire. “This is something I made but it’s also separate from me,” she said. “The conclusions people draw are not really up to me, and I like that.”

Reproduction Production is on display from April 1-12, 2024, in Hurley Gallery at the Lewis Arts complex.