Growing up in Chicago, Paula Wilson’s very first job was working for the ceramist Marianne Hammett.
It was a formative experience for the budding artist. “Marianne showed me that as an artist, you don’t have to stick to just one thing—creativity thrives in exploration and community,” she says. Today, Wilson’s practice is expansive and exuberant, combining painting, printmaking, installation, clothing design, video, sculpture, and more into a kaleidoscopic body of work. Wilson and her husband, the woodworker Mike Lagg, live in Carrizozo, New Mexico, an old railroad town with a thriving community of artists, where they’ve decked out their home in the handmade. The pair run the cheekily named MoMAZoZo out of three buildings they own in the town’s downtown and help run the Carrizozo Artists-in-Residence program with Joan and Warren Malkerson. Rebecca McNamara, an associate curator at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College in Sarasota Springs, New York, wrote about Wilson and Lagg’s magical corner of the world in “A Handmade Wonderland” in the Spring 2025 issue of American Craft. Paula Wilson: Towards the Sky’s Back Door, a catalog of Wilson’s 2023 show at the Tang, is available now.
How do you describe your work or practice in 50 words or less?
I live and work in Carrizozo, New Mexico, creating paintings, prints, collages, textiles, videos, and large-scale installations that blur the line between art and everyday life. My work is rooted in process—layering materials, exploring connections between people, nature, and place. It’s handmade yet expansive, intimate yet larger than life.
Wilson poses in front of Yucca Rising, acrylic and oil on muslin, 188 x 188 inches, 2021. She made the piece using woodblock printing, relief printing, trace monoprinting, monotype, and pressure printing.
