Folayemi Wilson

Early life and education She is the youngest child of Katherine Elizabeth Kilpatrick Wilson, a hairdresser, and Milton H. Wilson Sr., a handy person who taught her how to upholster furniture in her teens. Her father was also an avid reader, whose many magazines inspired Wilson's imagination, as did his love of bright colors. After her mother died when she was thirteen years old, she was advised on graduating early from high school, and she began to travel and live on her own. During graduate study, she connected the formal and conceptual language of 20th-century Modernism with Black cultural memory and cosmology, noting that they "share the same roots." In 1991, she established Studio W., a graphic design studio, building off her professional experiences from work in the magazine industry. Their work was social practice–focused, in order to make public spaces in Chicago more inviting.

Visual art career In 1995, Wilson, along with artists Renee Cox, and Tony Cokes, created the Negro Art Collective (NAC) to fight cultural misrepresentations about Black Americans.Their first public intervention, Mama I Thought Only Black People Were Bad, was a provocative street art campaign in New York and Los Angeles that challenged stereotypes of Black criminality using data and visual rhetoric.

Her Seeing series (2006) included minimalist black furniture pieces juxtaposed with photographic diptychs and her own body, prompting viewers to question how racial and cultural identity are perceived and constructed through objects. Eliza's Peculiar Cabinet of Curiosities was an ongoing, Afrofuturist project and was used as a location for related events and performances. It was on display from 2016 to 2017 at the Lynden Sculpture Garden in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 2018, Wilson spent time at the John Michael Kohler Arts/Industry Artist Residency Program to work with pottery. Her work is in the museum collection at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Wilson has served on the board of the American Craft Council (ACC). She later returned to Nigeria to perform in Lagos at the International Arts Festival Festac ’77. This exhibition is an immersive, multimedia installation that combines architecture, sculpture, sound, and video to create a celestial Afrofuturist environment that explores themes of ancestry, memory, and identity. It serves as a homage to the cultural figures, histories, and aesthetic movements that influenced Wilson's artistic practice.

Academic career In July 2021, Wilson was appointed as first associate dean for access and equity in the Penn State College of Arts and Architecture. She previously was the co-director of academic diversity, equity and inclusion at the Columbia College Chicago.

Publications

Wilson, Fo (2013). The Baartman Diaries (Chicago, Illinois: Studio W Editions).