Paula Wilson: Toward the Sky’s Back Door

Wilson invokes her own Black biracial identity in her mixed-media pieces, inspired by art historical traditions as much as the plants outside her door

This first major monograph features nearly two decades of work by American artist Paula Wilson (born 1975), who frequently intermixes her identity as a Black biracial artist, living in a rural desert town in New Mexico, with narratives and motifs across time and place.

Toward the Sky’s Back Door documents her wide-ranging career with essays by leading scholars Taylor Renee Aldridge, Ebony Y. Rhodes and Stephanie Sparling Williams, and a new interview with the artist. Wilson embraces a both/and approach to art and living, using the same techniques, materials and motifs to make rugs and clothing 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. This volume presents paintings, sculpture, prints, collages and videos, with different mediums frequently intermixed in a single work, ranging in scale from small paper-mosaic work to beyond-life-size female figures.