Robert Wilson (director)
Robert Wilson (born October 4, 1941) is an American experimental theater stage director and playwright who has been described by The New York Times as "[America]'s – or even the world's – foremost vanguard 'theater artist.'"[1] He has also worked as a choreographer, performer, painter, sculptor, video artist, and sound and lighting designer.
Robert Wilson
Wilson is best known for his collaboration with Philip Glass and Lucinda Childs on Einstein on the Beach, and his frequent collaborations with Tom Waits. In 1991, Wilson established The Watermill Center, "a laboratory for performance" on the East End of Long Island, New York, regularly working with opera and theater companies, as well as cultural festivals. Wilson "has developed as an avant-garde artist specifically in Europe amongst its modern quests, in its most significant cultural centers, galleries, museums, opera houses and theaters, and festivals".[2]
Early life and education[edit]
Wilson was born in Waco, Texas, the son of Loree Velma (née Hamilton) and D.M. Wilson, a lawyer.[3]
He had a difficult youth as the gay son of a conservative family.[4] "When I was growing up, it was a sin to go to the theater. It was a sin if a woman wore pants. There was a prayer box in school, and if you saw someone sinning you could put their name in the prayer box, and on Fridays everyone would pray for those people whose names were in the prayer box."[5] He was stuttering and taken to a local dance instructor called Bird "Baby" Hoffman, who helped him overcome his stutter.[6]
After attending local schools, he studied business administration at the University of Texas from 1959 to 1962.
He moved to Brooklyn, New York in 1963 to change fields, study art and architecture. At some point he went to Arizona to study architecture with Paolo Soleri at his desert complex.[7] Wilson found himself drawn to the work of pioneering choreographers George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, and Martha Graham, among others.[8] He engaged in therapeutic theater work with brain-injured and disabled children in New York. He received a BFA in architecture from the Pratt Institute in 1965.[9] He directed a "ballet for iron-lung patients where the participants moved a fluorescent streamer with their mouths while the janitor danced dressed as Miss America".[6] During this period, he also attended lectures by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (widow of László Moholy-Nagy), and studied painting with artist George McNeil.
Exhibitions[edit]
Extensive retrospectives have been presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1991) and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (1991). He has presented installations at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1993), London's Clink Street Vaults (1995), Neue Nationalgalerie (2003), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.[41] His tribute to Isamu Noguchi was exhibited at the Seattle Art Museum and his Voom Portraits exhibition traveled to Hamburg, Milan, Miami, and Philadelphia.[10] In 2012, Times Square Arts invited Wilson to show selections from his three-minute video portraits on more than twenty digital screens that lined Times Square.[41][42] In 2013 he participated at the White House Biennial / Thessaloniki Biennale 4. He collaborated with artist Bettina WitteVeen on an exhibition space based on her photography book "Sacred Sister." The book consisted of photos of women that WitteVeen captured in Indonesia and Southeast Asia in 1995. The exhibition space was set up in 2003 at Art Basel Miami Beach, and was also composed of layers of autumn leaves on the floor of a studio.[43]
Wilson is represented exclusively and worldwide by RW Work, Ltd. (New York), and his gallerist in New York City is Paula Cooper Gallery.
The Watermill Center[edit]
In 1991 Wilson established The Watermill Center on the site of a former Western Union laboratory on the East End of Long Island, New York. Originally styled as "a laboratory for performance", The Watermill Center operates year-round artist residencies, public education programs, exhibitions, and performances. The center is situated within a ten-acre (4.0 ha) campus of gardens and designed landscape, and contains numerous works of art collected by Wilson.[35]