Anne Wilson

Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist who creates sculpture, material drawings, video and performances that are grounded in a textile language. Her artwork resides in permanent collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Des Moines Art Center; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Detroit Institute of Arts; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Foundation Toms Pauli, Lausanne, Switzerland; and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan. Wilson was named a 2015 United States Artists Distinguished Fellow and is the recipient of awards from the American Craft Council (2024 Gold Medal), Renwick Alliance (2022 Distinguished Educators Award), Textile Society of America, Artadia, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, National Association of Schools of Art and Design, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Wilson is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she continues to advise graduate students.

Credit: Anne Wilson Studio


Errant Behaviors is a video and sound installation which proposes surreal implications and intersections between textile, moving image, and sound. Extending from Topologies, Wilson’s sculpture first shown in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, the latent associations and meanings of Topologies are emphasized, enlivened, and acted out. Remastered in 2022, Errant Behaviors may be experienced in new light due to current digital technologies.
Errant Behaviors is a video and sound installation which proposes surreal implications and intersections between textile, moving image, and sound. Extending from Topologies, Wilson’s sculpture first shown in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, the latent associations and meanings of Topologies are emphasized, enlivened, and acted out. Remastered in 2022, Errant Behaviors may be experienced in new light due to current digital technologies.
Each of the 12 image and sound animation segments on screen 1 was conceived to play in relationship to the 11 image and sound animation segments on screen 2. Because the play order is shuffled and there is no beginning or end, ongoing improvisational relationships are created.
The frame-by-frame hand construction of animation is very much like the structural development of lace – a structure that accumulates part by part over time through sequences of motions with the potential to replicate and expand infinitely. The hand processing of both the animation and the textile displays aspects of foible, imperfection, curiosity, and irregularly.
There are relationships between humor and darker aspects to the content in Errant Behaviors, evolving ideas about quirky growth, sometimes playful and sometimes sinister-seeming relationships, rude actions, repetitions and accumulations. The behaviors of Errant Behaviors have to do with aspects of impropriety, aggression and accident.Shawn Decker’s sound compositions utilize both processed recorded and found sounds to create environments of sonic activity which mirror the behavior of the visual images. The sound in some segments has a singular presence; other segments have a more cinematic presentation; some employ partially synchronized sound within a sonic environment. There is consideration throughout of the relationships between natural, human, and synthetic rhythms.
Image from the artist and Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art
Image from the artist and Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art
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