Lifetime Achievement

Robert Wilson

Design poet Robert Wilson defies easy categorization. He explores the human experience often in provocatively enigmatic ways. Over his thirty-year career, his brilliant approach to theater, dance, set design, installations, architecture, and furniture has raised the standards of creativity in all those fields—and beyond. His influential body of work ranges from the 1971 Deafman Glance and 1976 Einstein on the Beach to the more recent collaboration with Lou Reed titled POEtry. Fascinated by questions of space and time, he describes space as horizontal, time as vertical, and the intersection of the two as “the architecture of everything.” The bold magic of Wilson’s sets are achieved through refined craft and great technical complexity. His famed Watermill Center, founded in 1992 on eastern Long Island, is a multidisciplinary laboratory that spawns new work in the arts and lures distinguished artists and aspiring protégés alike from around the world.