About Us
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There is no specific type of artist that we focus on or primarily support. Creative expression comes in a wide variety of artistic disciplines and genres. We are looking for passion and excellence in your craft. Tell us why your work is important to you and how you hope it will impact others.
Where Eagles Soar (Isaiah 40:31)
Integrity: Arts & Culture Association is honored to approve Wilson's funding request, and we wish him continued success in his endeavors.
CONGRATULATIONS TO IACA CYCLE #39
MINI-GRANT RECIPIENT, KEITH WILSON!
I'm a multidisciplinary artist working for almost 15 years primarily in poetry and visual poetry (which includes photography, image manipulation, gouache and watercolor painting, and graphic design). I’m in love with the things one art form can do that are untranslatable into any other form, especially in work that defies, in some way, its own boundaries. My work vacillates between lyricism and play--a lot of my work challenges and allows for the reader / viewer / participant to construct or deconstruct meaning, both in terms of language that can be read a variety of different ways, and in terms of the way that I often reimagine ordinary objects and forms into poetic objects. For instance, I have work that reimagines "objective" pie charts as highly subjective expressions of personal identity (what "percentage" am I of my father? of my mother? of being a man?). Or I will reimagine a chess puzzle to express the act, through play, of gentrification--what is the feeling of moving white pieces into the spaces of black pieces in order to achieve success?
I write about race, love, violence, and history in work that is often rhetorical, philosophical, political, and affective because I believe that truth often overlaps itself in conflicting ways. And I create art pieces (physical art objects, paintings, and interactive media) that approach the same subjects with the hopes of interrogating race, gender, and power.
Many of my recent works require fabrication—I would love to use the grant fund to create the last two pieces in the provided work sample on high quality wood.
1. Who is There to Eulogize the Tree - This poem uses the footnote, a kind of formal burial place for words, to talk about familial and historical death.
2. Uncanny Emmett Till - The uncanny valley is a concept from robotics and animation that represents the way people feel uncomfortable when they can't tell for sure whether or not something is human. I use this graph to express the historical murder of Emmett Till.
3. Angles of Incidence - This poem uses the visuals of geometry to talk about the abstracted (and invented) violence accused of the "Central Park 5" before their acquittals.
4. Melting Pot - This poem uses the visuals of pie charts to talk about the different parts that (might) make me who I am.
