Hilary Wilder is an American visual artist and educator based in Richmond, Virginia.White, Michelle. "Sublime Anachronisms: Hilary Wilder's Contemporary Landscapes," Art Papers, November/December 2006, pp. 20–23.Golden-McNerney, Regan. "Hilary Wilder: Ornament and Crime," Artlies, No. 67, p. 91.Virginia Commonwealth University. Hilary Wilder, Arts Faculty. Retrieved June 6, 2024. She is primarily known for painting and installation art, but has also worked in sculpture and video.Devine, John. "Hilary Wilder: Laguna," Glasstire, October 4, 2004. Retrieved June 6, 2024.Sanchez, Marisa. "Wish You Were Here," Nearer to Thee, Seattle/Bellevue, WA: Open Satellite, 2008.Davenport, Bill. "Buffet DVD release buffet," Glasstire, February 21, 2010. Her art employs wide-ranging, familiar visual languages—for example, from landscape and abstract painting and modern design—to explore how personal experience, historical events and places are represented, and sometimes fictionalized, misunderstood or idealized.Devine, John. "Hilary Wilder," Artlies, No. 56, p. 109.Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Island Time: Galveston Artist Residency – The First Four Years, Houston, TX: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2015. Retrieved June 6, 2024.
Wilder's work has been recognized by the John S. Guggenheim and Pollock-Krasner foundations and belongs to the public art collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH).John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Hilary Wilder, Fellows. Retrieved June 6, 2024.Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Hilary Wilder, Artists. Retrieved June 6, 2024.Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Hilary Wilder, Glacier, Collection. Retrieved June 6, 2024. She has exhibited at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, MFAH and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, among other venues.Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. "VMFA's fellowship exhibits, 2010–2021," 2021.McQuaid, Cate. "Into the Woods: Artists Show Poetic, Playful Takes on Thoreau at deCordova," The Boston Globe, December 4, 2014. Retrieved June 6, 2024.Ruth Erickson. "Walden, Revisited," ARTnews, May 2015, p. 118.Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. "40 Years of Discovery: Gifts of Clint Willour," Exhibitions, 2018. Retrieved June 6, 2024.
Biography and career Wilder studied art at Bates College in Maine and at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she earned an MFA in 2001.
She has had solo exhibitions at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (2006), Open Satellite (2008, Seattle),Graves, Jen. "Transcendent," The Stranger, March 5, 2008. Retrieved June 6, 2024. The Suburban (2010, Oak Park, IL), MFAH (2017), Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2019), and the Hiram Butler Devin Borden (later Devin Borden) Gallery in Houston (2003–15), among other venues.Britt-Darby, Devon. "Hilary Wilder: A Northern Tale," Arts + Culture Texas, June 29, 2012.Smart, Jennifer. "The ACTX Top Ten: December 2015," Arts + Culture Texas, December 2, 2015. Retrieved June 6, 2024.
Wilder is a professor in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she has taught since 2007. Prior to that she taught at Princeton University, the University of Houston and the University of Texas, San Antonio.Princeton University. Hilary Wilder, Visual Arts Faculty. Retrieved June 6, 2024.
Work and reception Wilder's paintings, installations and sculptures are often characterized by a central tension between representation and abstraction—for example, mixing elements of the picturesque 19th-century Romantic style and the modernist abstract grid—that signals competing impulses of a human desire for order and the chaos of the cosmos.Garland, Tracy. "Anderson Gallery opens fall exhibitions," VCU News, September 4, 2013. Retrieved June 6, 2024.
In earlier paintings, Wilder created images of manmade and natural disasters, employing the sublime language of painters such as Caspar David Friedrich, J.M.W. Turner and the Hudson River School. Reviewers suggest that despite their atmospherics and complex brushwork, these apocalyptic images registered skepticism for such idealized visions through subtle formal disruptions and insertions of graphic shapes, irregular grids, decorative patterns and historical motifs.Douberley, Amanda. "The Sirens' Song," Glasstire, February 27, 2007. Retrieved June 6, 2024. Wilder's impermanent, site-specific installations offered a similar critique, revealing the "naturalness" of representational painting as a construction by incorporating on-site architectural elements (walls, electrical sockets) as compositional elements or spilling contents onto the floor. Her later work has shifted in subject matter toward modern architecture and interior design, in pieces that incorporate multiple views, sources and disciplines to construct complex narratives.Li, Diana. "Fear Climate Change or Embrace Its Beauty," New Haven Independent, November 12, 2013. Retrieved June 6, 2024.
Specific artworks and exhibitions Wilder's landscape-based work in the 2000s often focused critically on constructed moments of transformation, revealing disparities between representations of catastrophes and the profound upheaval they caused, events and memory. Art Papers critic Michelle White wrote, ""For Wilder, the formal and conceptual contradictions posed by the landscape are therefore the perfect tools to question the meaning of place and the dissonance that occurs when the real stumbles upon the ideal." Artlies critic John Devine wrote that her largely abstract paintings "explor[e] the border between order and disorder, tranquility and turbulence, stability and volatility—in short, flux."
In several Installations, Wilder created immersive environments with representational and abstract forms extending from paintings into gallery spaces. Responding to news photos of a Laguna Beach wildfire in Laguna (2004), she combined landscape paintings, disruptive color fields applied to walls, and agitated geometric forms interrupting both elements. The landscapes of Courting Disaster (2006) were loosely based on Ernest Shackleton's harrowing account of the Endurance Arctic expeditions. In "Nearer to Thee" (2008)—its title a reference to the Titanic—she explored the speculative desire for life-changing experience through three large, site-specific paintings, prints and a video.
Wilder's subsequent work has incorporated elements, themes and patterns from modern architecture, interior design and domestic objects (e.g., Black and Brown Chair (After Rietveld), 2015).The Poor Farm. "The Poor Farm Experiment IV," 2012. Retrieved June 6, 2024. Her exhibition "Ornament and Crime" (2010) used a 1909 essay by architect Adolph Loos condemning the use of ornamentation as "degenerate" as a touchstone; its work combining bold pattern, minimal forms and mass-produced materials was described in Artlies as "a clever, wistful commentary on the battles once waged over art and ornament" (e.g., An Immodern Proposal #1 and 2). In the installation Greatest American Hero (Thoreau's Desk Eight Times) (2014), Wilder offered a playful, questioning take on Thoreau as wilderness man through paper and plastic sculptural reworkings of his writing desk at Walden Pond.Smee, Sebastian. "The Ticket: Art," The Boston Globe, December 20, 2014.
Wilder's later painting took on a more fractured, collage-like appearance, juxtaposing images of nature, abstract pattern, trompe l'oeil effects and multiple views.Weinberg, Elizabeth. "Heat Included," Daily Nutmeg, December 20, 2013. In her 2019 exhibition, "They Bring Flowers," she presented paintings inspired by narratives drawn from 20th-century architecture, world history, art and mythology—each of which described an encounter between a woman and a specific system or individual that aimed to diminish her (e.g., Violet in Rome (Rocks and Bullets), 2019).
Collections and recognition Wilder has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2006), a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (2007), and fellowships from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2009; 2018) and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2002–04).Newman, Daniel. "Virginia museum hands out $196,000 in fellowships," Richmond-Times Dispatch, March 1, 2009. Retrieved June 6, 2024.Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. 2009-2010 Fellowship Winners: Hilary Wilder, Archive. Retrieved June 6, 2024.Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Core Program Archive, Fellowships. Retrieved June 6, 2024. She has received artist residencies from Cow House Studios (Ireland),Cow House Studios. Previous Participants, 2011–12. Retrieved June 6, 2024. Galveston Artist Residency,Galveston Artist Residency. Residency Program. Retrieved June 6, 2024. the Ingmar Bergman Estate (Sweden),Ingmar Bergman Estate. Guests. Retrieved June 6, 2024. Jentel Arts,Jentel Arts. Residents. Retrieved June 6, 2024. NES Artist Residency (Iceland)NES Artist Residency. Artists – 2011. Retrieved June 6, 2024. and Ucross Foundation.Ucross Foundation. Alumni. Retrieved June 6, 2024. Her work belongs to the public art collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and U.S. Department of State.Art in Embassies. Hilary Wilder, Glacier, U.S. Department of State, Personnel. Retrieved June 6, 2024.
Her videos were screened at the Pacific Film Archive and Chicago International Film Festival, where she was awarded its Gold Plaque in the experimental short video category in 2001.
References
External links Hilary Wilder official website Hilary Wilder, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Hilary Wilder, Virginia Commonwealth University