Art Forum Guest Speaker, Letha Wilson

Letha Wilson is known for combining photography with industrial materials like concrete and steel. Wilson cuts, tears and shapes her photographs, pushing and pulling the prints into place and then encases portions of the composition in cement. She explores the magnetic pull of the American West, alluding to the landscape’s intrinsic role in our own myths of reinvention, endless possibility, and inevitable promise.

Letha was born in Hawaii, raised in Greeley, Colorado, and currently works in Craryville and Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from Syracuse University, and her MFA from Hunter College in New York City. Letha attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009, and her artwork has been shown at many venues including Mass MoCA, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Columbus Museum of Art and the International Center for Photography.

Letha’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, the New York Times, The New Yorker, and Artsy among others. Letha has been awarded artist residencies at the Santa Fe Art Institute, Yaddo, MacDowell, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Sharpe -Walentas Studio Program. In both 2019 and 2014 Letha was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Photography. In 2023 Letha had solo exhibitions at the Richard and Dolly Maas Gallery at Purchase College, State University of New York, and GRIMM Gallery in London, UK.