AUGUST WILSON : THE WRITER'S LANDSCAPE
ABOUT THE PROJECT
The exhibit proposed to bring August Wilson’s story to life in three stages: the office where he worked, the Coffee Shop where he listened, and the Street of his significant plays. We were very much interested in creating a path for the next generation to take inspiration from his methods, including his interative, collage-like working method informed by his “4B’s”, the Blues, Amiri Baraka (Black Power), Romarie Beardon, and Jorge Louis Borges.
August Wilson: The Writer’s Landscape, is the first exhibition dedicated to the life and works of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson. It explores the people and places of Pittsburgh, where Wilson was born and raised, and which had a profound impact on shaping his worldview and inspiring his 10-play American Century Cycle. These plays, which distill each decade of the 20th century through Wilson’s lens, ends in an homage to Wilson’s one-man play “How I learned what I learned,” a distillation on lessons-on-becoming-an-artist.
What we created, was not just a discourse on August Wilson's work, but of his truer legacy - of teaching the next generation how to use cultural expression to reach cultural understanding. — JERRY EISTERHOLD