Looking Back: Artistic Practice as a Decolonial Model

Since installation artist Fred Wilson’s canonical museum intervention, Mining the Museum, at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore in 1992, he has been the central figure of an artistic practice often dubbed “institutional critique” or the deconstruction of the biased and exclusionary structures of traditional museological display. Wilson's "rearrangements" of art objects and historical artifacts often involves a sustained study of the early modern histories of colonization and slavery as manifested in that period’s visual culture and in its modes of knowledge production, which include natural history, physiognomy, and ethnography. In this paper, I want to consider how a contemporary artist, such as Wilson, harnesses those early modern objects and histories as a decolonial model of artistic practice and knowledge production.