Paula Wilson

Born 1975, Chicago, IL, United States

Wilson fuses wide-ranging techniques and media with her observations of the natural world, where it is a matter of survival to make space for oneself to live, love, and make art.

Selected Works

Paula Wilson

Introduction

Biography

Introduction

Paula Wilson is an artist, cultural producer and teacher. She cultivates a holistic practice incorporating her life in the high desert into artworks whose multiple styles and media themselves necessitate the act of making connections across cultures. Recurring themes of feminine power, natural life systems, and art-making itself converge under the umbrella of regeneration and change.

Wilson’s life in a high desert town in New Mexico plays an important role in her art. The town, called Carrizozo, was incorporated in 1899 around a steam engine railway station, which became inactive, and is now home to less than 1000 people. Some of the old facades remain on the town’s main street, the tallest of which are the Lyric Theater and an old hotel. These crumbling adobe buildings flank the warehouse that is Wilson’s studio. Behind them, Wilson and her partner, Mike Lagg have built a strange and wonderful built environment that blends sculpture garden with utility – hot tub, recycling center. The couple runs an open studio program they call MoMAZoZo and helps to run the Carrizozo Artist in Residency Program. They share their art with the community, and they share their community and its place with artist colleagues from around the country. The place is marked by modest dwellings, yucca plants and cacti, and wide-open spaces with dramatic mountains in the distance. Geology is raw there, with White Sands Monument and the Valley of Fire just 20 minutes away in either direction.

Around their home, guest house, and studios, everything from paintings, floor treatments, blinds, wooden carpentry to plates and cutlery exist on a continuum that connects the lived, loved and created. Wide-ranging styles and multimedia artworks reflect Wilson’s openness to the fullness of her experience in this landscape, her intellectual life and her mastery of multiple artistic mediums and techniques including printmaking, painting, assemblage, collage, sculpture, fabric arts, design, installation, video and performance. Narrative artworks place feminine subjects in positions of power. Others give attention to quotidian acts of intellectual freedom, like a woman bent over a task or a book in concentration. The picture rejects voyeurism and gives form to interiority. She can be whoever and wherever she wants to be.

Wilson’s research in the liberal arts, sciences, humanities and philosophy make her practice tremendously wide-reaching, so that it is based in New Mexico with roots and seedlings in cultures around the world. Her work is just as layered in her references as her techniques, calling on African American art, indigenous African art, Pre-Columbian, European and ancient Western art. Her expansive practice forcefully proclaims her place in the art histories she engages.

Biography