Wilmer Wilson IV’s squirrel artwork
This fall, the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania (ICA Philadelphia) presents the first solo museum exhibition of Philadelphia-based artist Wilmer Wilson IV, including new and recent work spanning performance, site-specific installation, sculpture, and works on paper. On view September 26, 2026, through February 21, 2027, Wilmer Wilson IV:SKIRL! focuses on the Eastern Gray Squirrel, an animal shaped by the ecological and colonial histories of the East Coast, as a lens for examining American identity, history, and urban space.
SKIRL! marks the launch of R+D, ICA’s first formal artist residency program, under the new leadership of Daniel W. Dietrich, II Director Johanna Burton. Expanding ICA’s commitment to radical experimentation and scholarship production, R+D supports artists in developing new work through a sustained, exploratory process that leverages the resources of the University of Pennsylvania and the city of Philadelphia. R+D activates the museum as a live laboratory, championing intellectual risk-taking and collaborative research over traditional exhibition-making.
“This exhibition embodies ICA’s mission at every level,” said Burton. “As the first presentation of our R+D residency, it foregrounds process over product, inviting audiences into a practice of curiosity and experimentation that is still unfolding. Wilmer’s research moves fluidly across urban ecology, American political history, animal studies, and performance, and it demonstrates exactly the kind of intellectual risk-taking this program was created to support.”
A multidisciplinary artist, Wilson traces subaltern meanings in overlooked aspects of everyday life, creating expansive forms of relation and representation beyond dominant social narratives. SKIRL! extends this inquiry to the Eastern Gray Squirrel. In the mid-nineteenth century in Philadelphia, city planners began introducing squirrels into urban parks as a way to reshape public space, part of a broader effort to produce orderly, leisure-oriented civic environments that reflected middle-class, predominantly white ideals of behavior and belonging. First fostered as “public pets,” these woodland animals proved to be a remarkable evolutionary success, adapting to human architecture in once-unimaginable ways and, in turn, subtly shaping the development of the city itself.
Leveraging local archives and resources, including the Philadelphia Zoo, Penn’s Materials Library, Penn’s School of Veterinary Medicine, and the expertise of scholars such as Lucia Jacobs, Professor Emerita in the Department of Psychology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Wilson traces case studies that reveal how squirrels move in and out of social, political, and cultural life. This research forms the basis for the more than a dozen new and recent works on view, which include a flag-sized bronze sculpture of a notable squirrel from American history; a series of hanging squirrel dreys, or nests, constructed out of natural materials; and large-scale architectural sculptures, which will function as a platform for smaller interventions referencing human and animal appropriation of domestic and urban infrastructure.
These works consider how categories such as “pet,” “pest,” and “wildlife” produce hierarchies of value, visibility, and disposability. Placed together, they explore how these logics extend across species lines, shaping not only human relationships to animals but also the racialized frameworks through which human life itself is valued.
“SKIRL! will create transformative experiences by asking audiences to look again at something they have walked past their entire lives and see it differently—the squirrel as part of the civic body,” said Hallie Ringle, Daniel and Brett Sundheim Chief Curator of ICA Philadelphia. “Wilmer’s collaborations with community partners across Philadelphia ensure that the project reaches beyond the art world and into a broader public conversation about how we live alongside other species, and each other.”
Public Programs
A full slate of public programs will accompany SKIRL!, including an urban wildlife walk; a performance by Wilson activating the exhibition’s sculpture and ICA’s outdoor space; and a panel discussion on animal life, race, and the politics of the urban.
Please check back for details on programming at icaphila.org.
About Wilmer Wilson IV
Wilmer Wilson IV centers marginal embodiment(s) in contemporary life through his multidisciplinary practice, which spans painting, sculpture, photography, writing, and performance. Wilson has frequently examined how blackness is shaped in and by American city space, drawing on density’s material cacophony to produce visual planes that reconfigure what is legible and to whom.
His work is included in the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario; Baltimore Museum of Art; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, among others.
Born in Richmond, Virginia, and based in Philadelphia, Wilson holds a BFA from Howard University and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania.
About the Institute of Contemporary Art – University of Pennsylvania
The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania (ICA Philadelphia) is a global hub for contemporary art and ideas. Free and open to all, ICA Philadelphia is dedicated to supporting artistic practices across disciplines and serving as a laboratory for risk-taking, community-building, and knowledge-creation.
Since 1963, ICA Philadelphia has championed the University’s commitment to cultivating the next generation of imaginative creators and thinkers. Through commissions, exhibitions, programs, publications, and special projects, ICA Philadelphia fosters bold experimentation, curiosity, and discovery.
Learn more at icaphila.org.
