Fred Wilson: Irma, Ota, and I

Fred Wilson brings a new exhibition, Irma, Ota, and I, to the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, running from March 5 through August 8, 2027. Wilson has spent his career asking how the way we collect and display things shapes our understanding of identity, memory, and power, and this show keeps that question right here in the city.

The exhibition pulls from two histories that run parallel in St. Louis: the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition—the World's Fair that put the city on the map—and Wilson's own family, which lived here across several generations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It's a personal take on a public event, and the two end up tangled together.

One of the central figures is Ota Benga, an Mbuti man captured from the Congo and exhibited at the Fair, and later at the Bronx Zoo. Wilson's connection to him goes back to a 2008 bronze bust he made of Benga, cast from a plaster bust produced by the American Museum of Natural History. That museum had commissioned life masks of Benga and dozens of other people on display at the Fair, so the sculpture itself comes from a process of documenting people as exhibits. At the Pulitzer, that bust sits alongside Wilson's own sculptures, paintings, and works on paper.

But the show isn't just about the Fair. Wilson also brings in historic artworks from local collections related to the exposition, and personal objects that belonged to his paternal grandmother, Irma Dixon, who was born and raised less than a mile from the museum. Seeing her things next to the Fair's records puts a family's life right up against the city's official history. Irma, Ota, and I runs March 5 through August 8, 2027, at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.