SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY.- The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College and Delmonico Books | D.A.P. announce the publication of Paula Wilson: Toward the Sky’s Back Door, the first major monograph for the acclaimed artist.

Paula Wilson has garnered international recognition as a multimedia artist whose work spans painting, printmaking, collage, and video—with different media frequently in a single artwork—and challenges the separations between art and everyday living. Her work brims with urgency, joy, and curiosity for and reverence to the world around us. She uses the same techniques, materials, and motifs to make clothing and “rugs” as she does for art on the gallery wall. Throughout her work, little to nothing is discarded, with scraps from one artwork recycled into another, reflecting both a practice of eco-sustainability and a model for creating something new from fragments left behind.

Wilson pulls from her identity as a Black biracial artist living in a rural desert town in New Mexico, while also referencing thousands of years of art history, including ancient Greek pottery, African D’mba, mosaics, still lifes, landscapes, and nudes. Born in Chicago and a graduate of the MFA program at Columbia University, Wilson lives and works in Carrizozo, New Mexico (population: 971).

This new publication documents her wide-ranging career with stunning photography of nearly two decades of work, as well as her rural home and studio, which she shares with her husband and artistic collaborator, woodworker Mike Lagg; essays by leading scholars Taylor Renee Aldridge, Ebony Y. Rhodes, and Stephanie Sparling Williams; and a new interview between the artist and Rebecca McNamara, the Tang Associate Curator who organized the exhibition. Paula Wilson: Toward the Sky’s Back Door originated at the Tang before traveling to the California African American Museum (CAAM), Los Angeles.

Wilson will celebrate the publication of the catalogue with signings at the following places:

• Tamarind Institute, Thursday, March 13, 5–7 pm (MT): The University of New Mexico College of Fine Arts, 2500 Central Avenue SE, Albuquerque, NM 87106

• Carrizozo Library, Saturday, March 15, 1–3 pm (MT): 406 Central Avenue, Carrizozo, New Mexico, 88301

• LA Art Book Fair, Saturday, May 17, 2–2:30 pm (PT): Wilson will sign books at DelMonico Books’ booth: ArtCenter College of Design, 950 S. Raymond Ave, Pasadena, California, 91105

Additional locations to be announced later.

Paula Wilson: Toward the Sky’s Back Door (184 pages; hardcover; $40; designed by Morcos Key) is edited by McNamara, with a foreword by Dayton Director Ian Berry. The monograph is now available from the Tang website. The catalogue joins a long list of critically acclaimed and award-winning Tang publications, which includes Christine Sun Kim: Oh Me Oh My (2024); Isaac Julien: Lessons of the Hour – Frederick Douglass (2022); Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards (2022); Like Sugar (2020); Sixfold Symmetry: Pattern in Art and Science (2018); Fred Tomaselli (2010); and Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress (2003).



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