Artist, curator and educator Fo (Folayemi) Wilson will deliver the 2017 Paul R. Jones Lecture at the University of Delaware. Originally scheduled on March 14, the lecture has been rescheduled at 4 p.m., Wednesday, March 15, in the Gore Recital Hall of the Roselle Center for the Arts.

Her talk, “The Liminality of Race and Representations of Blackness,” is free and open to the public.

The presentation will be part of Wilson’s March 13-15 visit to UD as the second distinguished visiting scholar in the University’s African American Public History and Material Culture series.

In addition to delivering the Jones Lecture, Wilson will meet with students, faculty and staff. She will also tour the conservation studios at Winterthur Museum and will lead a multidisciplinary workshop on art and material culture in Mechanical Hall Gallery.

Wilson earned her master’s degree in fine arts at the Rhode Island School of Design and is an associate professor at Columbia College in Chicago. Her lectures typically focus on art, design and craft to international audiences.

Her writing and reviews have appeared in NKA, Journal of Contemporary African Art, the International Review of African American Art and Communication Arts.

Wilson’s art offers audiences new ways of thinking about and interacting with history. She uses constructed space and furniture forms to create experiences that reposition historical objects and/or aesthetics in a contemporary context.

Her current long-term installations include Eliza’s Peculiar Cabinet of Curiosities at the Lynden Sculpture Garden in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Sounding Bronzeville, a public work commissioned by the Field Museum and Chicago Park District in the park's Burnham Wildlife Corridor in Chicago.

Her curatorial projects include The New Materiality: Digital Dialogues at the Boundaries of Contemporary Craft (2010), which originated at the Fuller Craft Museum in Massachusetts and traveled to such national venues as the Milwaukee Art Museum; and Ekphest: A Festival of Art and Word (2015), which presented original poetic responses to work in the collections of various Chicago museums and institutions.

About the Paul Jones Initiative

The Paul R. Jones Initiative fosters educational inquiry, interdisciplinary engagement and critical thinking with and through African American art at the University of Delaware. 

Founded in conjunction with the gift of the Paul R. Jones Collection, housed in Mechanical Hall, the initiative supports a broad range of programming intended to strengthen the collection and its interconnectivity with campus life and community.

The Paul R. Jones Annual Lecture honors the late Mr. Jones and his gift of African American art to the University in 2001. Since its arrival on campus, UD has supported a wide range of research and curricular programming using African American art as the seminal point of departure. This includes American art and culture in dialogue with Africa and its diaspora.

Mr. Jones, who received an honorary doctor of letters degree from UD in 2004, died in 2010.

The 2017 Jones Lecture is sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, the Paul R. Jones Initiative, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center and Special Collections and Museums.