About This Event

Wilson (Diné) observes that American culture remains enamored of one particular moment in a photographic exchange between Euro-American and Aboriginal American societies: the decades from 1907 to 1930 when photographer Edward S. Curtis produced “The North American Indian” photographic series. For many people even today, Native people remain frozen in time in Curtis’s romanticised and stereotypical portraits. Wilson’s CIPX project intends to challenge the documentary mission of Curtis from the standpoint of a 21st century indigenous, trans-customary, cultural practitioner, supplanting Curtis’s Settler gaze and the old paradigm of assimilation with a re-imagined vision of the complexities of contemporary Native people.\ \ Wilson won the Native American Fine Art Fellowship from the Eiteljorg Museum, and was awarded a prestigious grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Wilson has held visiting professorships at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Oberlin College, and the University of Arizona. He managed the National Vision Project, a Ford Foundation funded initiative at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, and helped to coordinate the New Mexico Arts Temporary Installations Made for the Environment (TIME) program on the Navajo Nation. Wilson is part of the Science and Arts Research Collaborative (SARC) which brings together artists interested in using science and technology in their practice with collaborators from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia Labs as part of the International Symposium on Electronic Arts, 2012 (ISEA). Recently, Wilson completed an exhibition and artist residency at the Denver Art Museum and is currently the King Fellow artist in residence at the School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe, NM.\ \ Image:\ © Will Wilson 2021\ \"K\'omoks Imperial Stormtrooper (Andy Everson)\" Citizen of the K\'omoks First Nation