The Mete of the Muse

Two female figures, one painted white, the other painted black, are juxtaposed in The Mete of the Muse. The white sculpture depicts a Venus/Aphrodite figure, a popular Greco-Roman type represented in many museum collections; its black counterpart reproduces an eighteenth-century Egyptian statue of the goddess Nephtys in the collection of the Musée du Louvre, Paris. From the frontal and hieratic stance of the Egyptian figure on the left to the lyrical contrapposto of the Neoclassical figure on the right, the work compares color, form, movement, and ultimately different sets of aesthetic principles and ideals. By juxtaposing these works from African and European lineages, Wilson calls attention to the historic construction of Blackness and to the racial biases ingrained in museum displays. While the figures present obvious contrasts, they also transcend such binaries. The figures both "meet" on the shared plinth and "mete" or dole out questions invited by their pairing. Wilson cast his figures from copies of copies of the original works; his bronzes were made from plaster cast versions that he had bought at an antique shop and plaster cast studio in New York. Not only do Wilson’s copies of copies speak to the persistence of an image passed from century to century, but they also attest to the ubiquity and longevity of certain types of muses, exemplars whose position in the canon is reinscribed time and time again.