Paula Wilson in WBUR: 15 Art Exhibits Worth Exploring This Fall

‘Staying with the Trouble: Paula Wilson + Faith Wilding’
Tufts University Art Galleries
Through Dec. 5
Paula Wilson is an African American mixed media artist who creates work investigating the female identity through the lens of cultural history. Faith Wilding is a Paraguayan artist whose work examines the somatic, psychic and sociopolitical history of the body. Now the two have come together as part of a larger Tufts exhibit featuring 11 artists. Spanning both the Grossman Gallery on the School of the Museum of Fine Arts campus as well as the Aidekman Arts Center in Medford, the exhibition offers strategies for getting through a difficult political and socioeconomic moment. Wilson and Wilding, shown in dialogue at the Grossman Gallery, invite us to look toward nature. We see Wilson’s 2018 video installation “Spread Wild: Pleasures of the Yucca,” which in languidly erotic fashion recreates the pollination of the yucca flower through dance, making us wish for just one night as a yucca moth. A selection of Faith Wilding drawings and paintings on paper and papyrus incorporate the human and natural worlds, mirroring the lustiness of Wilson’s video and helping us to recognize the spiritual in the sensual.