Fred Wilson is an American conceptual artist. Wilson frequently uses “the museum as medium.” He first rose to prominence after the success of his 1992 exhibition “Mining the Museum” at the Maryland Historical Society, in which he placed unlikely objects next to each other in order to challenge the overlooked nature of racial and social tensions in the institutional sphere. By pairing things like silver tea sets and slave shackles in vitrines together, Wilson has since said that he didn’t intend to shock, but to have “people to come in and realize that they had to do some work, to put it together.”

Born in the Bronx, New York in 1954, Wilson got his BFA from SUNY Purchase in 1976, where he was the only...