Keith Wilson is a New York and London based artist, curator, educator, and cultural producer whose work spans sculpture, printmaking, participatory installation, and international exhibition making. He is Professor of Sculpture at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Trained at Oxford and UCL, Wilson’s artwork combines the pragmatic with the playful, employing industrial design and creative placemaking to encourage novel interactions with historical spaces, social environments, and with familiar objects. Similarly, his curatorial and production practice have served to sculpt social spaces, connecting not only people but also materials and ideas across space and time. From 2017 to 2022, Wilson was Director of the Center for the Humanities, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, where he oversaw numerous cultural programs, including an international collaboration with Wellcome that resulted in artist residencies, screenings and events, as well as exhibitions on the themes of contagious disease and mental health that took place across the globe.
In the UK, Wilson’s projects have included landscape-scaled public works from Steles at London 2012 Olympics to more recently building a sculpture park at the Park Hill estate in Sheffield, as well as permanent outdoor sculpture commissions for clients ranging from Barratt Homes (2019) to Leeds University (2014). His curatorial ventures include Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy (2011), and The Object Sculpture at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds (2002). He produced Wellcome Collection’s first public gathering exhibition in a project entitled Things (2010), a project re-imagined for the exhibition Calendar at the MAC Belfast (2016), and forming the basis for his ongoing Object Library project. He retains an affiliation with Sheffield’s S1 Artspace as project champion for the new city centre museum.
Wilson has had solo exhibitions at the MAC Belfast, Camden Arts Centre, and Milton Keynes Gallery, and his work was featured in British Art Show 7. In 2011, he and Penelope Curtis co-curated Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy. For many years he was a trustee of Whitechapel Art Gallery and Camden Arts Centre, actively involved in major building projects at both venues.
Interested in the cultural status of sculpture and the extent to which sculpture can play a part in social transformation, Wilson’s outdoor works include Sculpture Park Hill, which transformed the interior of the Park Hill estate in Sheffield (Europe’s largest listed structure) into a public sculpture park; and Steles, commissioned for the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games–35 buoyant sculptures now serving as both event reminder and river infrastructure.