The ADAA: Wilmer Wilson IV

Susan Inglett Gallery will present works by Wilmer Wilson IV at the upcoming ADAA Art Show 2022 from 3-6 November 2022. The artist will be present at the fair on 6 November from 12 - 3 PM. 

Gathering photographs of primarily African-American figures from street fliers, Wilson is concerned with representations of the "marginalized body as shaped in and by city space." The artist distorts the identities of these figures, attaching the images to columnar kiosks in a protective scrim of clear push pins. In doing so, Wilson IV forces an active engagement with the image, which cannot be seen from one perspective alone. The push pins build a protective layer between subject and viewer, necessitating a careful consideration of the image, at once obscuring, distorting, and amplifying.

The labor-intensive act of stapling almost 200,000 staples, or attaching hundreds of pushpins, onto these large images suggests an act of care to his practice. Wilson takes images of Black bodies subject to fetishization and hyper-vigilance and constructs a protective layer or veil over them. 

The aim has always been to lessen the demand of visibility on bodies specifically, and to make use of pedestrian objects from public and domestic spheres to create barriers, viewing devices and/or mediating layers that modulate an audience's relationship to the bodies imaged or implied beyond said layers.

- Wilmer Wilson IV

Wilmer Wilson IV (b. 1989, Richmond, VA) lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. He received his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015 and his BFA from Howard University in 2012. He is a recipient of the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Fellowship (2017) and the American Academy in Rome Fellowship (2014). The artist has been part of exhibitions and performances at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, University of the Arts, Philadelphia (2022); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2021); Philadelphia Museum of Art (2021); New Orleans Museum of Art (2019); New Museum Triennial, NYC (2018); Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (2017); Flanders Fields Museum, Belgium (2017); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2015); and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. (2015). His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; The Phillips Collection; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others.

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