Will Wilson (photographer)

Early life and education

Wilson was born in San Francisco in 1969, but spent his childhood growing up on the Navajo Nation. He attended the government boarding school in Tuba City through 8th grade and was then plucked from the reservation and sent to Northfield Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts with a scholarship from the "A Better Chance (ABC)" Foundation. He attended Oberlin College as an undergraduate with a major in studio art, and obtained a Master's of Fine Arts in photography at the University of New Mexico.

He has been an artist-in-residence at the School for Advanced Research.

Career

Since 2012, Wilson had been involved in the creation of a project titled the Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX). Inviting a number of indigenous artists and other professionals, they are all involved in the production of various pieces of art of indigenous peoples that pose for them. Wilson, himself, uses a "old fashioned, large format camera and the historic wet plate collodion process" in order to create photos that are reflective of historic photographs. The resulting studio of photos from him and the other artists have been featured in a number of museums, including the Denver Museum of Art and the New Mexico Museum of Art.

In 2014, Wilson's work was included in an exhibition of contemporary Native American Photography, As We See It, alongside Matika Wilbur, Tom Jones, Larry McNeil, and Shelly Niro, among others. The exhibition traveled through Russia and in 2016 and 2017 will visit the American West. In February 2016, Wilson's work was included as a counterpoint to a large show of Edward Curtis photographs at the Portland Art Museum[1]