You Can Make Change

1990s Artists Community

Wilson's 1994 exhibition, OpEd: Fred Wilson, was presented at the Ontario Street location during the planning period for the MCA's new building on Chicago Avenue. Wilson's particular brand of exhibition-making, which asked a museum to think explicitly about its goals and intentions, was particularly valuable for the museum's staff and Board.

I'm going to sound very hippy-dippy, but coming to it with love, coming to it as a part of rather than an adversary to, you can make change. That's how I see myself, and that's why I stay so long at an institution. I mean the longer the better, if I can, because I really want people to know me. I mean, initially, whenever I'm at a place—and it certainly happened here and continues to happen here—when I meet different people, for some reason they think that I am either out to make fun of an institution or I'm an extremely angry person. Of course I'm angry, but my anger is not in that same kind of way. I'm angry as much as at my own inner—the aspects of the museum that I see in myself, that I disagree with in myself. I mean the anger is internal as well as external, so I can't really get—I don't point fingers because I would have to point them at myself as well.

Installation view, OpEd: Fred Wilson, MCA Chicago, Apr 30–Aug 21, 1994. Photo © MCA Chicago.

Installation view, OpEd: Fred Wilson, MCA Chicago, Apr 30–Aug 21, 1994. Photo © MCA Chicago.

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