Fred Wilson lecture on "The Silent Message of the Museum" February 3, 2010

SOUTH ORANGE, NJ - The M.A. Program in Museum Professions and Institute of Museum Ethics at Seton Hall University are pleased to announce a lecture by conceptual artist Fred Wilson on Wednesday, February 3 at 7 pm in Jubilee Hall Auditorium. Wilson’s talk, titled “The Silent Message of the Museum,” is free and open to the public.

In his talk at Seton Hall, Wilson will discuss how his projects remind the viewer that there are many stories contained within any single object, and not just the one story described in the wall label or museum catalogue. Wilson will show how his interventions expose the one-directional view typical of traditional museum practice—from colonizer to colonized, settler to native, white to black—and remind us that there are many different perspectives and viewpoints other that those contained in traditional museum wall text.

A 1999 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant as well as the 2003 American representative at the Venice Biennale, Fred Wilson is internationally known for his museum installations, in which he re-installs and re-labels objects owned by a museum for the purpose of creating new meanings and non-conventional narratives. Beyond bringing home the point that the way we view and “read” objects is conditioned by context and juxtaposition, Wilson’s installations subvert, criticize, or poke fun at the unspoken assumptions that museums make about the social order, including such issues as class, gender, and ethnicity. He has created such projects across the US and around the world in such diverse venues as the Seattle Art Museum, Museums of History and Ethnography and the National Gallery of Jamaica, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Dartmouth College, and the Museum of World Culture in Gothenborg, Sweden.

Official Website: http://museumethics.org/content/fred-wilson-silent-message-museum