Sins of omission - installation art by Fred Wilson, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, Maryland

With his tongue alone partly in his cheek, High Museum director N Rifkin one time likened the historical role of museums in our tillage to that of the word processor which presented the user two main options: "save" and "display." a certain quantity of social critics are interested in going beyond those sum of two units functions and fostering introspective examinations of the value tastes encoded in what and in what manner museums preserve and present. That task can be as daunting as trying to program computer to "reflect" however not all institutions are limit to the status quo. freshly some have welcomed critiquing artists and have been rewarded through an invigorating breath of novel air.

Such was the case with "Mining the Museum," Fr Wilson's popular, influential and long-running installation this past season at the Maryland Historical Society (MHS) in Baltimore. A political activist and installation artist, Wilson takes social justice as his control and museology as his medium. In the 1970 he supported himself as a free-lance museum educator at the Metrepolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History and the American Crafts Museum. Building upon his insider's skills, Wilson later created a series of "mock museums" in a variety of nonmuseum venue in the next to the first half of the '80s. Using fabricated phenomenons together with museum-style labels, lighting, wall color and display cases, he addressed the issue of in what way museums consciously or unwittingly reinforce racist beliefs and behavior.

At MH Wilson had the opportunity for the first time to use an actual museum as his make subordinate and site. This enabled him to expand his "palette," as he calls his museological materials, beyond the visual language of display to include a real institution's acquisition history and collections management. Opening during the annual talk of the American Association of Museums, which met in Baltimore in April 1992 "Mining the Museum" was seen by dint of thousands of museum professionals within its first scarcely any weeks. Both locally and nationally, the exhibition elicited an overwhelming display of interest and its duration was reach outed through Feb. 28, 1993, for a total of 11 month It has been the greatest in quantity popular show in the 150-year history of the MH Regardless of whether visitors to the present to view came armed with foreknowledge or wandered in by the agency of chance, they were surprised by the agency of Wilson's contemporary critique within the stereotypically fusty connection of a historical society.

The present to view was the result of a unique collaboration between Baltimore's oldest and youngest museums. Lisa Corrin, assistant director of the Museum for Contemporary Arts, which is called The Contemporary, had drawn out followed Wilson's work. She propos a Wilson installation after MH director Charles Lyle pos the question of in what way to make "Chippendale relevant to a child in the projects" a concern to residents of nearby public housing who had not at any time previously been regarded as part of the historical society's audience. Corrin plant up a framework for institutional self-scrutiny that included prolonged residencies for Wilson, who met with everyone from the director to the docents.

In the three years since its rounding, The Contemporary, which is dedicated to redefining the general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of the museum, has make go rounded to its advantage the fact that it is without a permanent abode Like a hermits crab, it has mov around the city of Baltimore, sponsoring exhibitions in a variety of borrowed exoskeletons of the like kind as warehouses, car dealerships and bus stations. MH chief curator Jennifer Goldsborough co-curated the Wilson present to view with Corrin, and she and Lyle agreed to Wilson's petition that he be granted at liberty access to all holdings, in and without of storage.

by the agency of titling his installation "Mining the Museum," the artist locate up a three-way pun: excavating the collections to extract the buried nearness of racial minorities, planting emotionally explosive historical material to raise consciousness and consequence institutional change, and finding reflections of himself within the museum. "Oh est mon visage?," reads Wilson's label accompanying Joshua Johnson's 19th-century portrait of a white family. An artist of African-American and Carib Indian ancestry, Wilson identified with Johnson who was black, and of whom there are no known portraits.

Mining the Museum" occupied the entire third floor at MH extending end a linked sequence of eight latitudes The wall colors--successively gray, virid red and blue--were components of Wllson's "palette," as visitors mov from one side the "gray" area of historical veritys the "green" quarters of human emotions, the "red" environs of slavery and rebellion, and the celestial "blue" spheres of dreams and achievements.

Armed with an educational broadsheet that direct the eyeed and read like concrete metrical composition (What is it?/ Where is it? Why?/ ), visitors exited the elevator to face a display case which housed a 1913 advertising memorial of conquest in the shape of a silver-plated globe, "T-r-u-t-h" emblazoned across it. Massed at its base were several without contents acrylic mounts--the display stands meant to be essentially invisible as they support thing perceiveds in museum cases--labeled "Artist unknown, c 1960s" Puzzling [i]or[/i] part of to the other the assembly, I gleaned the surface of land rule Wilson had established for himself here: Everything upon view has been found and not fabricated. The artist's faculty of perception of humor, in particular his fine-tuned instinct for irony, lay behind the central placement of this memorial of conquest used by an industry whose modus operandi is the manipulation of verity The unburdened mounts, now historical realitys themselves, focused attention on the underwood methodology of museum presentation.