Ann Wilson, a member of New York’s influential Coenties Slip Group in the 1950s and early 1960s, died at her home in Valatie, New York, on March 11 at the age of ninety-one. Wilson was known for her works in which she used quilts as canvases, painting abstract shapes on their surfaces and thus bringing a form typically associated with craftsmanship into the realm of fine art. She was the last surviving member of her legendary cohort, which included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist and Lenore Tawney. Lured by the promise of cheap, albeit rudimentary and unheated, workspaces offered by disused sailmaking factories huddled under the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge, the group came together as the first wave of the abstract expressionism had reached its peak and that pop art and minimalism were about to reshape. the canon of art history.
Wilson was born Ann Marie Ubinger in Pittsburgh in 1931. The only child of learned parents—her educated father was a steel mill publicist and her librarian mother an accomplished painter—she was interested in art from childhood. After studying at Carnegie Tech alongside Philip Pearlstein and Andy Warhol (“probably the only Carnegie Tech student to wear a sky blue corduroy suit until graduation”, she said Jonathan Katz of the Smithsonian Institution in 2009), she moved to Philadelphia, where she graduated from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. After a two-year stint teaching art history at West Virginia University, Morgantown, she moved to New York, where she was picked up at the Greyhound bus station by collagist Ray Johnson, a friend of her future husband, William S. Wilson.
Through Johnson, she was introduced to various members of the New York AbEx scene, whom she found too aggressively masculine and dismissive of women. Hoping to meet other artists, she attended an event organized by the teachers of the Coenties Slip Drawing School, among them the abstract Jack Youngerman and the sculptor Robert Clark, who in a few years would change his surname to Indiana. The latter took a liking to her and informed her of an upcoming vacancy at the Coenties Slip warehouse where he rented a studio alongside Kelly, Martin and others. Wilson, who then taught at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and lived in the West Village across from poet ee cummings and a few doors down from modernist literary pioneer Djuna Barnes, moved into the space, and in no time, while she later told Katz, the number of her acquaintances in the art world “increased”.
Wilson was already using the quilt as a substrate; while at Coenties Slip she created perhaps her best-known work, Moby-Dick1955 found five-by-seven-foot quilt streaked with acrylic paint (“Completely new information to me,” writes Roberta Smith in these pages in 1974). Wilson continued to tap this vein into the 1960s, when the Coenties Slip scene began to fragment due to gentrification pressures. Moving her studio to downtown Canal Street, Wilson became involved with the events and performance art then taking place there. She threw raw poultry, sausages and fish at the performers of the iconic Carolee Schneeman joy of meat (1964). She became a close collaborator of Paul Thek, with whom she worked on installations, and of experimental director and playwright Robert Wilson, contributing to his productions. And she mounted her own performance projects, including 1977’s “Butler’s Lives of the Saints” and 1981’s “Projekt Faust.” Alongside her artistic creation, she taught all over town – at Pratt, Cooper Union, at Hunter College and Parsons School of Design. His experience in this field depressingly predicted the conditions of modern art schools. “I was one of the teachers on the subway,” she told Katz. “Do you know them in New York? They never give you tenure.
At the end of the 20th century, Wilson moved upstate, where she taught at Dutchess Community College while continuing to work and explore both new and old forms. His work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York; the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art and the Kunstmuseum Lucerne.
