CAA Public Lecture: Letha Wilson

Join us in Cranbrook’s deSalle Auditorium for a free, public lecture by Letha Wilson.

Letha Wilson will present a large selection of her artworks, spanning over twenty years, and share some of the inspirations, ideas, and interests behind her artistic practice. She will discuss her unique approach to landscape photography and how she combines it with sculptural processes and materials. Wilson frames her work at the intersection of photography and sculpture: she takes landscape photographs (often from the American West) and then physically manipulates them — folding, tearing, embedding them into concrete or steel — to challenge the flat-image convention. Her studio practice has a strong emphasis on material experimentation, where tests and trials lead to discoveries and unexpected results.

Letha Wilson was born in Hawaii, raised in Greeley, Colorado, and currently lives and works in Taghkanic and Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from Syracuse University and her MFA from Hunter College in New York City, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009. Her work has been shown at many venues including Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA; the Cantor Art Center at Stanford University, CA; Columbus Museum of Art, OH; the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; and the Nasher Museum at Duke University, Durham, NC. Solo and two-person exhibitions have been held at GRIMM Gallery in New York and London, Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris, FR, Higher Pictures Generations, New York, and Sperone Westwater, New York. Her outdoor sculptures have been installed in the City of Las Vegas, NV, Riverside Park, New York, NY, the Rochester Institute of Technology, NY, and the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA.

Wilson has been awarded artist residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Walentas Studio Program, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and Headlands Center for the Arts, and she received the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Photography in 2014 and 2019. For the academic year 2025, Letha was appointed the Stuart B. Cooper Endowed Chair of Photography at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (MICA). Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, the New York Times, The New Yorker, and Artsy, among others. Wilson’s artwork has been acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA, The Loeb Center at Vassar College, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, and the New York Public Library, among others.