The Middle Way, through the art of Andrew Wilson
Myth, ritual and memorial. The journey from this world to the next. The middle passage. The middle way.
The Andrew Wilson oeuvre is a captivating reflection, an invaluable recounting, of the points of connection between us. The threads that bind this flawed but beautiful United States of America.
In his recent exhibition as an invitee to the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) San Francisco’s Emerging Artists Program 2017–18, through his signature artistry in metal, wood and bronze, Wilson explored the divine in the mundane.
At once exquisite, and repulsive.

As in most of the artist’s current work, the MoAD exhibition cited the infamous Brookes. The artist’s ongoing engrossment with the image of the ship that became a rallying cry for the movement that would help bring an end to the mid-Atlantic slave trade to America in 1807.
Sketched lines. Jet bodies, horrendously dehumanized. Commodified.
Much of Wilson’s body of work at no point references the image directly. The middle passage is ubiquitously evoked. It is in the sense of loss, palpable in objects, otherwise mundane. The eternal separation of souls, the inevitable unforgivable result of an unthinkable industry.
Wilson’s work conjures in the viewer the stories we know exist in the blank pages of history. Unwritten. Too mundane to be recorded. A child separated from its mother. Husband from Wife. Brother from brother. The items left by those who took the middle passage.
Loss. Permanent loss. Death. Slavery. Wilson’s work lithely inhabits the space between both loudly, and with quiet elegance. The space of loss, in which the spirit of the deceased lives on still with those who loved them on earth.
In both Wilson’s Equivalencies: Abandoned Bodies at MoAD and his Just a Sweet Word a 4’X6’ plinth supports exquisitely delicate cotton husks cast in bronze.

According to Wilson, drawing from Saidiya Hartman’s account of her 2007 journey retracing the Atlantic Slave Route, the bronze husks account for the artist’s worth. The pounds of cowrie shell per pound of human flesh required to buy an African into slavery. The plinth represents the allowable space for three men aboard the Brookes, according to guidelines designed to attain the desired 454 slaves onboard a vessel. (The allocation for women and children was less)

In engaging the oldest and deepest divide in the history of the United States, Andrew Wilson urges slow conversations. Slow like his video projection piece, Shed, in which the viewer witnesses the removal of the artist’s dreadlocks. The process is gradual. Ritualistic. The hair hangs now bound together in a single singular work entitled Self Portrait.
The monetization and dehumanization of the Black body. The ramifications of commodification on Black masculinity and sexuality. Fashion. Consumption. The afterlives of the Atlantic Slave Trade more than 200 years after it ceased to exist. Threads of history, guiding us back to the current day.
Andrew Wilson dives deeply into the concepts that continue to elude us. These dialogues, the slow conversations Wilson urges, demand generational pertinacity. They are excruciatingly slow. And continue to be as vital as ever.
In this context, the artist’s next steps with exhibitions at Ross Art Museum, Delaware, Ohio (current through October, 2018) and at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts signature triennial Bay Area Now 8 (September, 2018 through March, 2019) will be exciting to see.
View Andrew I. Wilson’s work and upcoming exhibitions at www.aiwart.com. “Equivalencies: Abandoned Bodies” can also be viewed at the MoAD archive at www.moadsf.org. Saidiya Hartman’s 2007 work, “Lose your Mother,” is available via Macmillan.
