78th Annual Spring Show

April 21 - June 17, 2001

The Spring Show is an annual juried exhibition, open to all artists living within 250 miles of Erie, PA. This year's juror was artist Fred Wilson. This year 294 artists entered 621 works. Of these, 75 artists had 93 works accepted into the exhibit. Seven Juror's Awards and one Northwestern Pennsylvania Artist's Association Award were given to eight artists. Along with several guaranteed purchases from Museum Patrons, the total cash prizes and purchases equaled over $10,000.

The exhibit included a variety of media such as painting, photography, ceramic, drawing, metalwork, and more. Artists from Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio had their latest works on display.

Fred Wilson is a visual artist from the Bronx. He is well known for his installations--especially Mining the Museum, a 1993 collaboration between The Contemporary and the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore--in which he addresses such provocative ethnographic issues as identity, marginalization, colonization, and exile. Drawing from his personal experience as an African American of mixed ancestry and as an educator in New York City museums, Wilson’s art offers a powerful critique of museums and cultural institutions as "transmitters of visual colonialism" and calls into question the Eurocentric value system upon which museum collections are primarily based. His recent projects include solo and group exhibitions at the International Center of Photography (NY), The Drawing Center (NY), the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and an online project for the Museum of Modern Art in New York in conjunction with The Museum as Muse exhibition (1999). He is also an active participant in public art initiatives, having created Pangaea (1995), an outside installation at Townsend Harris High School in Queens, New York, commissioned by the Percent for Art program. Wilson’s work is in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), Seattle Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, Kresge Art Museum at Michigan State University, and the New School for Social Research (NY). Wilson received his B.F.A. from the State University of New York at Purchase in 1976. He is the recipient of grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts and he is also the recent recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in Visual Arts.