Carletta Carrington Wilson
The figure of the fugative “advertised for capture” was illustrated by various cuts accompanying ads appearing in numerous 18th and 19th century newspapers, not only, in the United States, but also in countries such as Brazil and England. Iconic figures of a man and woman form the foundation of knot free kNot human. Shown in flight, toting a bundle of scant possessions these figures appeared for centuries. They were not seen as symbols of and testaments to an unceasing resistance perpetuated on both sides of the Atlantic. Instead, they were seen as committing a criminal act.
Wilson’s figures give visual voice to individuals who decided to run towards an uncertain future. In the kNot free kNot human poster series Wilson re-imagines the iconic runaway slave advertisement. Here an individual reappears accompanied by text Which evokes the complexity of the predicament that binds them to a body that they cannot claim as their own. The narrative threads of Carletta Carrington Wilson’s literary and visual works began to merge as her artist books, installations and collages mirrored the melding of language and form.
World exhibited at the Seattle Art Fair, Wa Na Wari, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, CoCA (Center on Contemporary Art, King Street Station, Elisabeth C. Miller Horticultural Library, ArtXchange Gallery, Kittredge Art Gallery, Northwest African American Museum, University of Washington’s Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Gallery Onyx, Port Angeles Fine Arts Center and Denver Public Library created conversations and inferences between series and individual works. With a focus on the mid-to-late 19th and early 20th centuries Wilson attempts to “see through history.” An avid reader of history and historical documents, Wilson’s literary and/or visual responses answer questions she never knew to ask. Wilson is the author of the newly published Poem of Stone & Bone: The Iconography of James W. Washington Jr. in Fourteen Stanzas and Thirty-One Days.
Her poems and essays appear in Take A Stand: Art Against Hate as well as the anthologies, Stealing Light, Make It True: Poems from Cascadia and Beyond the Frontier: African American Poetry for the 21st Century. Journal publications include The African American Review, Cimarron Review, Calyx, Pilgrimage, Obsidian III, the Seattle Review and Raven Chronicles. Her zine, night of the stereotypes was exhibited in conjunction with the installation of the name at Wa Na Wari.
