Wilson first came to our attention with his now signature staple work in the New Museum Triennial, Songs for Sabotage.  Here the artist gathered photographic images of primarily African-American figures found on street fliers promoting parties, concerts, hair salons, and church events stapled to telephone poles around his West Philadelphia neighborhood.  Wilson enlarged, collaged, and returned the new prints to the sort of substrate where they were found, wood panels as stand in for the now ubiquitous plywood hoarding of boarded up buildings and constructions sites.

The images were then affixed with hundreds if not thousands of metal staples redolent of accumulations of staples on utility poles and urban kiosks. This protective scrim de-centers the subject, impacting not only the way the image is seen, but how it is seen. In doing so, the artist produces an image that is "materially specific, " where the staples act simultaneously as a critical viewing device for the photographs underneath, but also as a visual language in itself.  

WILMER WILSON IV (b. 1989, Richmond, VA) lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. He received his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015 and his BFA from Howard University in 2012. He is a recipient of the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Fellowship (2017) and the American Academy in Rome Fellowship (2014). He was the 2017 artist in residence at the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ieper, Belgium, and the subject of a solo exhibition the same year. The artist has been part of exhibitions and performances at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2021); Philadelphia Museum of Art (2021); New Orleans Museum of Art (2019); New Museum Triennial, NYC (2018); Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (2017); Flanders Fields Museum, Belgium (2017); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2015); and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. (2015). His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others.