FRED WILSON: THE MASTER PLAN or In Between the Big Bang and Modern Art Is the Restroom

THE MASTER PLAN or In Between the Big Bang and Modern Art Is the Restroom is a suite of twenty-two photogravures commissioned in 2004 by the Brodsky Center at PAFA and completed in 2009. They are on view for the first time at PAFA in the Works on Paper Gallery of the Historic Landmark Building, for one year, in conjunction with the exhibition A Nation of Artists.  

As an artist living and working in New York City, I had to support myself one way or another. Working simultaneously in the educational department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, and the American Crafts Museum made me wonder about how the environment in which cultural production is placed affects the way the viewer feels about the artwork and the artist who made these things.

—Fred Wilson

The prints reproduce floor outlines from visitor orientation maps of eighteen major art, cultural, and natural history museums in North America and Europe. The succession of diagrammatic images, precisely etched in off-white and black inks, encourage viewers to revisit memories of time spent in museums and recapture the sense of adventure sparked by picking up a map.

As one of the most influential American artists of this century, Fred Wilson has set in motion a profound transformation prompting museums to reconsider how they engage viewers’ learning experiences through art and artifacts. Two hundred and fifty years after Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827) established the American museum at the nation’s birth as the destination for educational advancement—commemorated in his painting The Artist in His Museum (1822), on view in the rotunda—Wilson examines the consequential role museums have played since.

Wilson’s conceptual inquiry challenges museums as neutral repositories of knowledge. His groundbreaking 1992 installation at the Maryland Historical Society, Mining the Museum, exhumed omitted histories of colonized and enslaved people and shifted attention to the authority embedded in institutional architecture, furniture, labels, and registration systems through his creative retooling of the display apparatus. His subsequent work in glass, sculpture, painting, drawing, and print addresses the cross-continental history central to the Black experience, including themes of race, diaspora, liberation, and mourning.