some practice interpretations

2026

Adam Daley Wilson (b. 1971, US) is a conceptual artist whose practice may be seen, in some respects, as investigating the intersection of language, human rule-making, and contemporary art’s relationship with human-made theory. His work is distinguished less by fundamental innovation than by innovation in procedural, experimental, and advocacy strategy: Wilson treats law (our human rules), theory (our human and scientific theories), and institutional documentation (our public documents that cause actions in our public courts) not as themes or as merely illustrative, but as actual artistic materials, embedding artist-made theories as text-based conceptual art directly into one of our last human places—our public courts—to initiate publicly-transparent art performances, carried out by public actors other than the artist himself.

Wilson’s background as a practicing appellate lawyer (Stanford Law; federal appellate clerkship) is not ancillary to his work; it is constitutive of it and informed by it. Rather than illustrating legal ideas, many of his works are actual public legal mechanisms—filings and briefs using public statutory language, the language of our courts’ public decisions, and the language chosen by lawyers in their roles as officers of the court—as both artistic medium and as site, or venue, for the public-actor performances that his text-based “artist-placed public documents” initiate.

This approach situates his practice within a lineage that includes text-based conceptual art and, at the same time, institutional critique, while diverging from them by—apparently for the first time—operating inside actual public judicial systems—our public courts—rather than re-staging representations of them in galleries or museums, and rather than addressing these public actors in our public institutions from the outside looking in. The practice enables art from within. It is art that is doing an inside job for the public good, on issues of general public importance.

Over the past decade, Wilson’s work has moved from painterly text-based abstraction (“inscription paintings”) toward installation-theory-performative projects that function simultaneously as art-as-activism and also as viable legal theories, offering real-world frameworks grounded in established legal precedents through which courts have a basis to improve the law in ways that benefit the general public good.

What may distinguish Daley Wilson from many artists working with text or activism is his apparent unwillingness to subordinate advocacy to aesthetics, and his unwillingness to avoid difficulty in favor of cliché or irony. For example, his ongoing projects (2023–2027) addressing the exploitation of mental illness by attorneys—who are officers of our public courts—and the related resulting harm to local rule of law caused by attorneys who disregard other procedural and substantive legal obligations, do not seek engagement through spectacle, hyperbole, or dogma.

Instead, these and related projects engage the public through existing, agreed-upon public law and public court procedures: documents of importance to the general public are placed where documents matter—in our public courts, where our public laws are applied—and the resulting art-performances by public institutional actors are transparently visible to the public to see for themselves, on issues of public importance. Daley Wilson’s art may thus be seen as earnest and even sincere, if such terms can be applied to text-based activist art, performance art, happenings, and conceptual and post-conceptual art.

In sum, Adam Daley Wilson’s current practice in this area may be seen as embedding traditional approaches to conceptual art and post-conceptual art directly into—within—our public legal systems, thereby treating law and theory as operative artistic materials rather than as subjects of representation or illustration or outside commentary. His work produces performance art pieces through an earnest, valid, procedural form of art-as-activism that functions and initiates from within our most important public institutions—our public courts of law—using our public institutions’ own agreed-upon rules—rather than commenting on them from the outside. It is more than an inside job: It initiates inside performances by actors to whom we have entrusted our most important public places. Ultimately, Daley Wilson’s art posits that courts may be our last human places—places of increasing importance for human decision making and preserving the rule of law nationally as well as each local rule of law.