An Artist’s Archive: Preponderance of Small Things, 2000-2019

In 2007 when Wilson was a professor at Syracuse University, the art slide library advertised that they were throwing away 200,000 slides that had been their art history slide collection in order to put their entire collection onto a digital format. Wilson managed to secure the painting collection of slides, donating the actual slides to a city school, she kept the cabinets and the paper dividers for drawing. For the next 12 years as an important part of her daily studio practice and travels, she created hundreds of drawings on these 2”x2” cards/dividers of significant plant species. These ranged from New York natives, to endangered seaside goldenrod, to Charlotte, North Carolina mosses; to Philadelphia urban weeds, to Brooklyn gingko trees. The entire cabinetry contains hundreds of drawings and has served as her artist’s archive. Some of these 2.5”x2.5” drawings have even been scaled up and included in a Mural Arts Project in Philadelphia.

Each drawing in it and of itself is not heroic but en masse they carry a significant weight – both in time and attention. The archive acknowledges the importance of paying attention to what is frequently overlooked. This cabinet of drawings are a record of hundreds of important small acts, reflecting the belief that it is this paying attention and hundreds of small acts that will save the planet.