Keith Wilson

Keith Wilson is an artist, curator, educator, and cultural producer whose work spans sculpture, printmaking, participatory installation, and international exhibition making. Wilson received international notoriety in the late 1990s for his Puddle sculpture, and subsequently for Steles (Waterworks) sculptural installation, commissioned for the 2012 London Olympics, as well as for co-curating the exhibition Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy of Arts. Biography Born in Birmingham, UK in 1965, Wilson studied art at the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford University from 1985 to 1988, and received his MFA from the Slade School of Art, University College London in 1990. Wilson won a Boise Travel Award in 1990 and a LAB Individual Artist Award in 1994. From 2017 to 2022, Wilson served as the director of the Center for the Humanities at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he oversaw numerous cultural programs, including an international collaboration with Wellcome Trust. Wilson is a research professor in sculpture at Sheffield Hallam University, in Sheffield, UK. Artwork and curatorial projects Wilson's public art projects include landscape-scaled abstract sculptures, which are a contemporary interpretation of the ancient steles form of monument. In 2012, Wilson was commissioned to create Steles (Waterworks) for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park on the occasion of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. The artwork consists of thirty-five chromatic steles along the WaterWorks River. Wilson stated that "These sculptures stand ready to serve old functions in a new way. They connect the parkland with the river, the canal and by extension the wider world. They provide a sense of place and occasion, anchoring memories of many a good day out. These colourful totems will help create a distinctive identity for this newest and boldest of London parks." Wilson's other notable steles include Sign for Art (Stelae 2014) on the campus of the University of Leeds, and Park Hill Plinths located in the Park Hill Estates housing development in Sheffield, United Kingdom. Wilson's curatorial projects include the exhibition Modern British Sculpture, which he co-curated with Penelope Curtis at the Royal Academy in 2011. The exhibition featured a selection of mainly abstract and conceptual sculpture from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and placed a focus on sculpture's long history of doing public work.