Paula Wilson


Paula Wilson is an African American "mixed media" artist creating works examining women's identities through a lens of cultural history. She uses sculpture, collage, painting, installation, and printmaking methods such as silkscreen, lithography, and woodblock. In 2007 Wilson moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Carrizozo, New Mexico, where she currently lives and works with her woodworking partner Mike Lagg.
WWW paulajwilson.com

Early life

Paula Wilson was born in Chicago and grew up in Hyde Park on the south side of the city, where her father, William Julius Wilson, was a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. Her mother, Beverly Ann Wilson, is an artist and bookbinder.

Education

Wilson attended Washington University in St. Louis from 1994 to 1998, earning her B.F.A. and graduating summa cum laude. She earned her M.F.A. from Columbia University.

Life and work

Wilson is known for her monumental and tactile work describing narratives and environments that fit her experience as a biracial black woman. She reimagines art historical tropes and inserts versions of herself into the landscape and canon. Shifting between graphic and painterly representations, she builds narratives by collapsing pictorial planes. Wilson’s work is anchored in self-portrait, printmaking, installation, and collage. She prints images with wood blocks, silkscreens, intaglio, and monotypes; layers acrylic, oil, and spray paint; shoots videos inserting 2-D work into the landscape; she cuts, glues, and stitches to make colorful, dense assemblages. Her works often burst from their wall or frame, reflecting a constant re-assembly of lived experiences: black and white, urban and rural, traditional and contemporary, singular and collective.
Wilson is co-founder of the artist organizations MoMAZoZo and the Carrizozo Artist in Residency.

Academia

Wilson was a Visiting Critic at Yale School of Art from 2005 to 2007 and an assistant professor at Columbia University School of the Arts from 2007 to 2008. In 2015. she served as the Louis D. Beaumont Artist-in-Residence & Visiting Assistant Professor in the College and Graduate School of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. She has been a visiting artist at many institutions and universities nationally.

Solo exhibitions

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Selected group exhibitions

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Personal life

Wilson currently lives and works in Carrizozo, New Mexico with her partner, woodworker Mike Lagg.

Recognition

Wilson has been featured in publications such as Hyperallergic, Artforum, The New York Times, ''The Brooklyn Rail,'' and The New Yorker.
Wilson received the Award of Distinction from Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, in St. Louis in 2019. She has been awarded residencies at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Vermont Studio Center, and the Giverny Residency from the Art Production Fund in Giverny, France. She has also received a place on the short list, Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, Studio Museum in Harlem, 2007 and the Milovich Award in Painting, School of Art, Washington University, 1998.