She first exhibited one of her “constructions” in the Institute’s 1959 Spring Show; in 1967 she captured three honor awards at its annual juried exhibition—and had her first one-woman show, at the Ross Widen Gallery. By the end of the ’80s Wilson had been taken on by a New York art dealer, the John Davis Gallery in SoHo. In 1993, she walked off with the $1,000 First Prize for Sculpture at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s prestigious May Show. Her pieces, some of which have sold for as much as $5,000, would eventually find their way into more than 100 private collections around the world. Her work, often described as “a celebration of the ordinary,” proved in fact to be something far more interesting: the familiar transformed into the unexpected, an art that surprises even as it delights.
La Wilson
