Keith Wilson (artist)

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Keith Wilson (born 1965 in Birmingham, United Kingdom) is an artist, curator, educator, and cultural producer. His work spans sculpture, printmaking, participatory installations, and international exhibitions. He became well known in the late 1990s for his Puddle sculpture and for Steles (Waterworks), a large installation made for the London 2012 Olympics, as well as for co-curating Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy.

Education and early work
Wilson studied at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford and earned an MFA from the Slade School of Art, University College London. He received the Boise Travel Award in 1990 and the LAB Individual Artist Award in 1994.

Career highlights
From 2017 to 2022, Wilson directed the Center for the Humanities at the City University of New York Graduate Center, overseeing numerous programs including a collaboration with the Wellcome Trust. He is a research professor of sculpture at Sheffield Hallam University.

Public art
Wilson creates landscape-scale abstract sculptures inspired by ancient steles. His Steles (Waterworks) for the 2012 Olympics features 35 chromatic steles along the WaterWorks River in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, connecting parkland with the river and the wider world. Other notable works include Sign for Art (Stelae 2014) at the University of Leeds and Park Hill Plinths in Sheffield. Sign for Art is a black polyurethane sculpture that nods to Wilson’s teaching experiences with visually and hearing-impaired adults, using two squiggly lines to evoke brushstrokes.

Curatorial work and projects
He co-curated Modern British Sculpture with Penelope Curtis at the Royal Academy in 2011. In 2010 he produced Things, an exhibition with an empty museum collection and public contributions, created with the Wellcome Collection. Things inspired The Object Library, a later project at the CUNY Graduate Center (2017–2020) where donated objects were collected as a public, alternative library.

Permanent installations
Wilson’s abstract steles are installed in several places in the UK, including Steles (Waterworks) along the waterway in central Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and Sign for Art (Stelae 2014) at Beech Grove Plaza, University of Leeds.

Website
Keith Wilson’s work and projects are featured at keithwilsonstudio.com.