Area Not Ready for Her?

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Wilson’s most recent work draws from the annual reports of the Philadelphia Commission for Human Relations, an organization that has worked to address issues of inequality and to enforce anti-discrimination laws since its establishment in 1951. As Wilson delved into these reports, he recognized the shifts in editorial styles that correspond to the tenure of different mayoral administrations overseeing the Commission. The artist further realized that changes over time in the tone of the Commission’s reports reflect the repercussions of racial tension in Philadelphia, and in American society and popular culture more broadly. 'Area Not Ready for Her?' takes inspiration from these tonal shifts and recontextualizes how Philadelphia African American neighborhoods and citizens were represented under the 1971–1980 administration of Mayor Frank Rizzo. (Rizzo, who served as Philadelphia’s police commissioner before he was elected as mayor, brough a brash and even authoritarian approach to the office and once encouraged his supporters to “vote white.” In his print, Wilson redacts a photograph reproduced in a Commission report from that period of African American dancer and actress Trina Parks, impersonating a character from the 1971 James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever. The image is accompanied by text from the report, which notes that a café owner refused to hire black dancers, claiming that “The area is not ready for them.” The report somewhat dubiously notes that after a formal discrimination complaint was filed against the owner, he ultimately only signed a decree promising that he would not engage in future discrimination—it would be difficult to determine if that promise was actually realized. Wilson strives to represent this difficult history forthrightly yet responsibly. By enveloping Parks’ figure in a protective screen of printerly markings, Wilson brings her image out of cold bureaucratic portrayal and turns it into a luminous and powerful focal point. Speaking about his art more generally, Wilson has described how “The aim has always been to lessen the demand of visibility on bodies specifically, and to make use of pedestrian objects from public and domestic spheres to create barriers, viewing devices and/or mediating layers that modulate an audience's relationship to the bodies imaged or implied beyond said layers.” He has achieved these objectives elsewhere by, for example, covering large photographs of Black people with a layer of silver metal staples, obscuring yet elevating the depicted subjects. Wilson produced his edition of 'Area Not Ready for Her?' at the Brodsky Center at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The Brodsky Center is a collaborative paper and printmaking center devoted to the creation of new work. Since its founding, the Center has completed over 300 editions with a diverse range of emerging and established artists, including Barkley Hendricks, Melvin Edwards, Kiki Smith, Joan Semmel, and Richard Tuttle.