How You Look is How You Look: An Interview with Fred Wilson

Fred Wilson

Photograph by Kerry Ryan McFate courtesy of The Pace Gallery, New York © 2005

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In the last two decades, Fred Wilson has garnered considerable acclaim in the United States and Europe for his site-specific interventions, which often mobilize neglected objects within museum collections in order to highlight the racial biases and blind spots of Western cultural institutions. On Sunday, September 16, 2007, I spoke with the artist at Kingston's Courtleigh Hotel just after the opening of his exhibition, An Account of a Voyage to the Island Jamaica with the Un-Natural History of That Place, at The Institute of Jamaica (IOJ) Gallery. The installation, Wilson's first in the Caribbean, was sponsored by The Florence H. and Eugene E. Myers Charitable Trust Fund and mounted with the assistance of Northwestern University graduate students enrolled in a seminar on slavery, the archive, and the museum in postcolonial Jamaica taught by my colleague Krista Thompson and me. An Account of a Voyage is one component of "Out of Sight: New World Slavery and the Visual Imagination," an ongoing series of projects Thompson and I have organized in conjunction with Wayne Modest, former IOJ Director of the Museums of History and Ethnography, to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the British abolition of the transatlantic trade in Africans. My conversation with Wilson ranged widely over the course of more than two hours, but we focused predominantly on the significance of working within a Jamaican cultural space, particularly in regards to the commemoration of slavery. The transcript of that interview serves as the basis for the present text, which has been edited and annotated for the sake of clarity and further contextualization, while preserving the integrity, texture, and spirit of our exchange.

First Contact

Copeland:

I want to begin by asking you to describe your first encounters in Jamaica and to say something about how your experiences of the place have evolved over the course of several visits.

Wilson:

An interesting place to start is my first trip. I'd never been to "the islands" before and I had all of these feelings about them that I didn't know I had. Having gone to Bermuda soon after my first visit here, I quickly realized the obvious: that each island has its own complexity, that each one is different from the other. I realized, too, that perhaps I was not really learning anything about the entire Caribbean, but learning about Jamaica, which I think was an important distinction for me. However, over time, coming to the island again and again, I began to realize the linkages between Jamaica and the Caribbean, contemporary Jamaican-ness and my own Caribbean-ness. It's been a very rich experience in that way and an unfolding one. My initial sense coming in from the airport was that downtown Kingston was very familiar to me. It felt like the South Bronx of my adolescence, but also—and more strongly—it felt a lot like Ghana, or Nigeria for that matter, like Accra or Lagos. That was the first thing that I could connect to my experience, which was really great for me since I hadn't been in West Africa since 1975. There was a familiarity that engaged me, and to find out that Ghana was one of the major places where enslaved Africans in Jamaica were from was all the more interesting. That was my initial experience. Beyond that, everything was completely new to me. Because we were in the city, none of the picturesque tropes of the Caribbean that one gets from the media and from individuals held. Everybody I told I was doing a project in Jamaica said, "Oh, that's great, that's so fantastic! It's like a vacation!" They just could not get beyond that image. Before I came, I knew that that wasn't what it was going to be, but it is interesting how dominant such an image is.¹ I also think that the strength of my experience had everything...