Fred Wilson, Visiting Artist Lecture 1995

Fred Wilson examines his experiences as a museum employee and curator which eventually led to what he considers his watershed work at the Longwood Gallery in which he showed how context could change the meaning of similar objects. This work culminated in a defining project at the Baltimore Historical Society called “Mining the Museum” and subsequent installations. The artist shares what happens when he invites museum-goers to join him in investigating largely unchallenged assumptions, attitudes, and methods of presentation within different types of museums (gallery, ethnographic, historical, natural history).