Keynote Speaker

Fred Wilson (b. 1954) is an artist of African-American, Native American and Caribbean descent who represented the United States at the 2003 Venice Biennale, and who has received numerous honors, including awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacArthur Foundation (1999). He is best known for his interventions into museum exhibition practice. Using the same design techniques as those of the museum, Wilson rearranges existing collections by including neglected objects within traditional displays to subvert established narratives. For example, in one well-known work entitled Cabinetmaking 1820-1960, part of Wilson’s landmark re-installation of the Maryland Historical Society, Mining the Museum (1992), the unlikely whipping post from a local jail was placed facing four elegant nineteenth-century parlor chairs.

As an artist and scholar who has been at the forefront of museological engagement with the objects of slavery and visual display of the “hidden” past, we are privileged to have Wilson give the keynote address to this conference and are excited about the exhibition he, with the aid of students from Northwestern University, will work on at the Institute of Jamaica (IOJ) in the summer of 2007.

The IOJ was founded in 1879 under British colonial rule and is the oldest museum in the Anglophone Caribbean. In addition to a collection of artifacts germane to slavery in Jamaica, the Institute’s collection comprises over 15,000 pieces, the oldest of these reflect the socio-economic and political characteristics of the Tainos, Jamaica’s first people.  Other collections include: objects reflecting Jamaican society after slavery; an African Collection; and a miscellaneous collection comprised of objects related to Afro- and Indo-Jamaican sacred traditions.  A version of that exhibition will be posted on-line on this website in December 2007.