Fred Wilson is another one of those MacArthur geniuses with a penchant for designing spaces that freak people out.

He doesn’t do it in the same way as, say, Yayoi Kusama or Pipilotti Rist, but still makes you feel weird all the same. But we’ll get to that.

Wilson was born in the Bronx, New York in 1954. His mother was Caribbean and an art and music teacher. His father was African American and the civil engineer that was responsible for the lower level on the George Washington Bridge in New York City, which is pretty sweet. As a child he was the only non-white kid in his class and as such basically had no friends because of the rampant racism of the time. He had to rely on his imagination for entertainment, which led to attending LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and classes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After high school, Wilson attended State University of New York at Purchase and graduated with a BFA in 1976. Again he was the only non-white person in his program. This time, it really got to him and became a theme in his work from this point forward.

After graduation, Wilson decided that he no longer wanted to work with his hands. Not that he completely stopped using them, but he started working with readymades. The combination of his use of found objects and his position as a freelance museum educator at The Met, The American Museum of Natural History, and The American Craft Museum resulted in Wilson’s interest in curating entire exhibitions as art pieces. His whole thing is that if you put things together that wouldn’t normally be seen side by side, the meaning or interpretation of the individual pieces change. He says that he’s “just using the museum as [his] palette, basically” to explore the issues of race and class in America. It’s genius. So genius in fact that in 1999 he won a MacArthur “genius” grant as well as the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award in 2003. He was made the Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Object, Exhibition, and Knowledge at Skidmore College and also represented the U.S. at the Cairo and Venice Biennale in 1992. So he’s, like, pretty accomplished.