Beckwith Lecture: Paula Wilson + Faith Wilding

Join us for our fall 2021 Beckwith guest lecturers, Paula Wilson and Faith Wilding. These artists are featured in conversation in the Grossman Gallery at SMFA / Boston. Wilson and Wilding both draw from the physical environment to engage with cultural and natural histories. Their works are part of the multivenue exhibition, “Staying with the Trouble,” also on view at the Aidekman Arts Center / Medford. The exhibition proposes strategies and coping mechanisms for navigating the current political and socioeconomic climate, which seems to be simultaneously slipping backward into the archaic and forward into the apocalyptic.

This lecture series founded in 1978 by Leo and Betty Beckwith to bring luminaries from the arts to our SMFA and Tufts student community.

BIOS: Paula Wilson is a mixed-media artist creating works examining women’s identities through a lens of cultural history. She uses sculpture, collage, painting, installation, and printmaking methods, such as silkscreen, lithography, and woodblock. Wilson received a BFA, summa cum laude, from Washington University in 1998, and an MFA from Columbia University in 2005. She currently lives and works in Carrizozo, New Mexico, with her partner, woodworker Mike Lagg.

Faith Wilding, an avowed ecofeminist, addresses in her work the deterioration of the natural world observed in her lifetime, specifically in her native Paraguay. She depicts symmetrical dualities: up and down, in and out, open and closed, evoking mystical, personal, and esoteric narratives. The works express interconnectedness and spiritual exuberance, while exploring visionary iconology of the energy and force of growth. Wilding’s work has been exhibited extensively over the last five decades, including the seminal survey WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, organized by Connie Butler, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Angelina Gualdoni is a New York-based painter inspired by the intersections of feminism, herbalism, and ecology, asserting domestic interiors as a crucible for innovation and resilience. Through the use of dyeing, pouring, staining, and textile patterning, she links women’s various creative practices, from industrial to domestic, decorative to metaphysical. Gualdoni has shown nationally and internationally at the Queens Museum, NY; Saint Louis Art Museum, MO; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; and Museum De Paviljoens, Netherlands.