Lectures
AAAA African American Maker Series: Folayemi (Fo) Wilson
April 2nd 2021, 12:00 pm–1:00 pm CT
Join the Museum’s African American Art Alliance for a Maker Series conversation with artist Folayemi (Fo) Wilson and Milwaukee-based artist Mutópe J. Johnson. The virtual event is free for all and will be moderated by Kantara Souffrant, the Museum’s Curator of Community Dialogue. This lecture is sponsored by The Chipstone Foundation and the Milwaukee Art Museum’s African American Art Alliance.
CCA Design Lecture Series
Folayemi Wilson – A Practice of Radical Making
October 22 2020, 6-7pm/PT
Wilson will discuss using speculative fictions as a strategy in her work, and a socially-focused design practice she shares with designer Norman Teague. Focusing on recent projects, she will talk about how she positions the Black imagination as an essential element in Black survival and self-determination through an Afrofuturist framework, and uses design to seat Black and Brown communities at tables of power to influence urban and social design.
UMN Department of Art
March 26, 2020 | University of Minnesota, Department of Art
The Visiting Artists & Critics Program fosters a greater understanding and appreciation of contemporary art through dialogue. Nationally and internationally recognized artists working in all media are invited by the Department of Art to present public lectures and meet with students in seminars and for individual critiques. All are welcome to attend lectures.
Panels
Craft Research Talks: Joinery, Joists and Gender
Friday May 6, 2022; 2 - 3:30pm EST
Join me with Deidre Visser and others profiled in her new book Joinery, Joists, and Gender: A History of Woodworking for the 21st Century (Routledge 2022), sponsored by the center for Craft for Craft.
AICAD x BEID Event / Pathways to Design
Tuesday, April 19, 2022; 3 - 4pm EST
The AICAD Association of Independent Colleges of Art & Design (AICAD) will host a moderated panel of contributors from the new book The Black Experience in Design. Co-editors Jennifer Rittner and Kelly Walters will lead a discussion with myself, designers Cey Adams, Terrayne Brown and Schessa Garbutt about how to create more pathways for young people of color into the profession.
Making Sound
Jun 24, 2021 | 07:30 PM ET
This conversation engages ideas around crafting and responding to sound as a material, as somatic listening, of audial embodiment and ways of being, and of seeing with our inner ear. Each of the invited respondents will participate in a conversation about how sound is present in their work and used in their creative or other practices.
Moderator: Folayemi Wilson
Panelists : Ashon Crawley, Barbara McBane, Dario Robleto.
Making a Seat at the Table: Women Transform Woodworking
10.10.2019 - AmericanCraft Council (ACC) “Present Tense” Conference
Organized in conjunction with a concurrent exhibition at The Center for Art in Wood, this interactive discussion tackles the ways that women makers are deploying their work to build a more sustainable, equitable, and inclusive future.
Moderator: Jennifer-Navva Milliken, artistic director, The Center for Art in Wood
Panelists: Meg Bye, woodworker and sculptor, founder and principal artist, Knot and Burl Studios. Emily Bunker, woodworker. Sarah Marriage, furniture maker and founder, A Workshop of Our Own. Laura Mays, program director, Fine Woodworking program at the College of the Redwoods in Northern California, founding president, Krenov Foundation. Janice Smith, furniture maker. Folayemi Wilson, artist, designer, educator, independent curator, and writer, trustees, ACC.
How We Hear Race?
CAA 2017 Annual Conference
Lost, Abundant, and Fugitive Sound: Listening, Seeing, Meaning, Experience
Chair(s): Lynn Marie Kirby, California College of the Arts. Barbara McBane, Independent Scholar
This paper questioned how we actually hear race and other identities? Although the visual plays a significant role in regards to race and its representations, other senses that are often silent in objectifying race are equally consequential in the construction of racial signifiers.
The sound sample below incorporates recordings from Voices from the Days of Slavery–an archive of interviews from formerly enslaved peoples–used with permission from the Library of Congress.
The Past is Around the Corner – Under the Way, 2016, in collaboration with Joelle Mercedes.
Voice of Isom Mosely, Gees Bend, AL, (1941), and Sally Ashton, Albemarle Co., VA , (1934); original and found recordings, (1:55).
The Decorative Impulse and the New Aesthetic Democracy
2014 - CAA Annual Conference - University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
The panel presented a resurgence of the decorative, not simply as an aesthetic, but as a resource for new strategies in making and conceiving work. With evidence of a new democracy and freedom with which artists are referencing the decorative as both subject and object, the panel examined the decorative impulse through the work of diverse contemporary artists, designers and makers.
Panel Co-chair Yevgeniya Kaganovich,
Panelists (w/links to videos of their presentations):
Tom Loeser, Professor University of Wisconsin Madison
Anne Wilson, Professor Emeritus, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Haneen Rabie, University of Maryland Baltimore County
Jenni Sorkin, University of Caliifornia Santa Barbara
Interviews
A Conversation with Folayemi (Fo) Wilson
April 29th 2021
Today Otherwise/Revival co-curator Jasmine McNeal interviewed the artist Folayemi (Fo) Wilson on the stories behind the sculpture “sweet jellyroll for terry,” her deep affection for the artist Terry Adkins, her understanding of spirit as the “luxurious moment of the in-between,” unexpected gifts of the pandemic and much more.
This conversation is part of a series of live interviews with the artists of Otherwise/Revival. Otherwise/Revival is our new show exploring the impact of the historic Black church—specifically the Black Pentecostal movement—on contemporary artists. Open now!
In Dialogue: Dark Matter Exhibition
Artist talk with Eco-feminist Chelsea Frazier, Ph.D. Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC)
Chicago, Illinois April 9, 2019
In conversation with Chelsea Frazier (and introduced by HPAC curator Allison Peters Quinn) around the exhibition Dark Matter: Celestial Objects as Messengers of Love in These Troubled Times, we talk about some of my other work in the context of the exhibition, use of archives, Black space, Afrofuturism, Black femme-interiority, Octavia Butler, love, and more.
Chelsea Frazier focuses on the intersection of Black feminist theory and environmental thought. She is currently a Faculty Fellow in the Cornell University Department of English, and is working on her first book manuscript—an ecocritical study of contemporary Black women artists, writers, and activists.
Sixty Inches From Center
And, Also, Too: Talks on Works, Ideas, and Process with Fo Wilson
Written by Lee Ann Norman
March 25, 2017
Art is affecting and hope-filled, expressing all the things words cannot. Cultural objects and experiences hold the power to reveal what is hidden about the world and ourselves, and artists act as conduits to these truths.
Story Corps
Former graduate student Viktor Le interviews me for StoryCorps. Givens asks me to share my story and influences in art and object making using the framing of four themes: folklore, matter, memories and ethnography.
Archived in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. October 2015.