Will Wilson’s art projects center around the continuation and transformation of customary Indigenous cultural practice. He is a Diné photographer and trans-customary artist who spent his formative years living on the Navajo Nation. Wilson studied photography, sculpture, and art history at the University of New Mexico (MFA, Photography, 2002) and Oberlin College (BA, Studio Art and Art History, 1993). In 2007, Wilson won the Native American Fine Art Fellowship from the Eiteljorg Museum, in 2010 the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Sculpture, in 2016 the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for Photography and in 2020 Wilson was the Doran Artist in Residence a the Yale University Art Gallery. Wilson has held visiting professorships at the Institute of American Indian Arts (1999-2000), Oberlin College (2000-01), and the University of Arizona (2006-08). In 2017, Wilson received the NM Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. His work is exhibited and collected internationally. Wilson is program Head of Photography at Santa Fe Community College.
https://willwilson.photoshelter.com
Auto Immune Response (AIR)
Since 2005, I have been creating a series of artworks entitled Auto Immune Response, which takes as its subject the quixotic relationship between a post-apocalyptic Diné (Navajo) man and the devastatingly beautiful, but toxic environment he inhabits. The series is an allegorical investigation of the extraordinarily rapid transformation of Indigenous lifeways, the dis-ease it has caused, and strategies of response that enable cultural survival. The latest iteration of the Auto Immune Response series features an installation of a hogan greenhouse, entitled, Auto Immune Response Research Facility, in which Indigenous food plants are grown. This facility will be accompanied by a set of large-scale photographs illustrating the botany and cultivation of vital resources. My hope is that this project will serve as a pollinator, creating formats for exchange and production that question and challenge the social, cultural and environmental systems that surround us.
The Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX)
As an indigenous artist working in the 21st century, employing media that range from historical photographic processes to the randomization and projection of complex visual systems within virtual environments, I am impatient with the way that American culture remains enamored of one particular moment in a photographic exchange between Euro-American and Aboriginal American societies: the decades from 1907 to 1930 when photographer Edward S. Curtis produced The North American Indian.[1]For many people even today, Native people remain frozen in time in Curtis photos. Other Native artists have produced photographic responses to Curtis’s oeuvre, usually using humor as a catalyst to melt the lacquered romanticism of these stereotypical portraits.[2] I seek to do something different. I intend to challenge the documentary mission of Curtis from the standpoint of a 21st century indigenous, trans-customary, cultural practitioner. I want to supplant Curtis’s Settler gaze and the remarkable body of ethnographic material he compiled with a contemporary vision of Native North America.
I propose to create a body of photographic inquiry that will stimulate a critical dialogue and reflection around the historic and contemporary “photographic exchange” as it pertains to Native Americans. My aim is to convene indigenous artists, art professionals and government leaders, as well as the general public, to engage in the performative ritual that is the studio portrait. This experience will be intensified and refined by the use of large format (8×10) wet plate collodion studio photography. This beautifully alchemic photographic process dramatically contributed to our collective understanding of Native American people and, in so doing, our American identity.
In August of 2012, at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, I initiated the Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX). This was the initial spark for an ongoing intervention into the history of photography. I aim to link history, form, and a critical dialogue about Native American representation by engaging participants in dialogue and a portrait session using the wet plate process. This multi-faceted engagement will yield a series of tintypes whose enigmatic, time-traveling aspect demonstrates how an understanding of our world can be acquired through fabricated methods. Through collaboration with my sitters I want to indigenize the photographic exchange.
I will encourage my collaborators to bring items of significance to their portrait sessions in order to help illustrate our dialogue. As a gesture of reciprocity I will give the sitter the tintype photograph produced during our exchange, with the caveat that I be granted the right to create and use a high resolution scan of his or her image for my own artistic purposes.
Ultimately, I want to ensure that the subjects of my photographs are participating in the re-inscription of their customs and values in a way that will lead to a more equal distribution of power and influence in the cultural conversation. It is my hope that these Native American photographs will represent an intervention within the contentious and competing visual languages that form today’s photographic canon. This critical indigenous photographic exchange will generate new forms of authority and autonomy. These alone—rather than the old paradigm of assimilation–can form the basis for a re-imagined vision of who we are as Native people.
[1] Edward S. Curtis, The North American Indian, Norwood, MA: The Plimpton Press, 1907-1930, 20 volumes, 20 portfolios.
[2] See, for example, Jill Sweet and Ian Berry, Staging the Indian: the Politics of Representation, Saratoga Springs, NY: The Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, 2001
Connecting the Dots: for a Just Transition
Connecting the Dots for a Just Transition intends to shape a platform for voices of resilience, Indigenous knowledge and restorative systems of remediation while bearing witness to a history of environmental damage and communal loss on the Navajo Nation.This innovative plan is based on a photographic survey of the over 500 Abandoned Uranium Mines (AUMs) located on the Navajo Nation. These AUMs are physical manifestations of a complex and traumatic history that has poisoned the land and endangered a people. This investigation will focus on the toxic legacy of uranium extraction and processing on Dinétah that continues to threaten the health of our people and land. Bearing witness to these sites, and the front-line communities affected by them, the project will serve as a catalyst for designing innovative solutions that refocus our understanding of what remediation can be. The project intends to develop new strategies of remediation that center Diné ways of knowing as it weaves together the interdisciplinary expertise required to address this pressing concern.