Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist who creates sculpture, drawings, performances and video animations that explore themes of time, loss, and private and social rituals. Her artwork embraces conceptual strategies and handwork using everyday materials—table linen, bed sheets, human hair, lace, thread, glass, and wire. In this latest iteration of MAD's Craft Front & Center series dedicated to showcasing the permanent collection, Wilson's newly acquired sound and video installation, Errant Behaviors, plays in the gallery. Its source material of lace and openwork fragments are also on view in The MAD Drawing Room, a creative space for drawing, writing, and close looking.
The MAD Drawing Room
Anne Wilson created The MAD Drawing Room for visitors to engage in the beauty and complexity of the artist's personal archives of lace and openwork textiles through close looking, drawing, or writing. The Drawing Room is inspired by the Davis Street Drawing Room, Wilson's experimental and participatory art project in Evanston, Ilinois. Within the space, visitors are invited to explore Wilson's library of art and fiber texts, listen to the playlist of sound sources for her video installation, and draw or write using the materials provided.
Errant Behaviors
Recently acquired for MAD's permanent collection, Anne Wilson's video and sound installation, Errant Behaviors, proposes surreal implications and intersections between textile, moving image, and sound. In the work, threads of lace come to life in an imaginary world through the large-scale projection of 23 frame-by-frame animations the artist constructed by hand. A soundtrack by composer Shawn Decker utilizes recorded and found sounds to create an environment of sonic activity for the threads that mirror their spirited and often humorous behavior.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist who creates sculpture, material drawings, and performances that explore themes of time, loss, and private and social rituals. Her artwork resides in permanent collections around the world, including the Museum of Arts and Design; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Des Moines Art Center; Detroit Institute of Arts; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan. Wilson was named a 2015 United States Artists Distinguished Fellow and is the recipient of awards from the American Craft Council (2024 Gold Medal), Renwick Alliance (2022 Distinguished Educators Award), Textile Society of America (2017 Fellow), the Driehaus Foundation, Artadia, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, National Association of Schools of Art and Design (Citation Recipient), Cranbrook Academy of Art (Distinguished Alumni Award), the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Illinois Arts Council. She is represented by the Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago and Paul Kotula Projects, Detroit. Wilson is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she continues to advise graduate students.
Meet the Artist
Anne Wilson: The MAD Drawing Room and Errant Behaviors, part of the Craft Front & Center exhibition series, has been made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Museum of Arts and Design together: Democracy demands wisdom. The exhibition is also supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Research was supported by a Craft Research Fund grant from the Center for Craft. Additional support from The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and The Blue Rider Group, Morgan Stanley.
Image: Installation view of Anne Wilson: The MAD Drawing Room and Errant Behaviors. Photo: Jenna Bascom