In the Center’s March 2026 Zoom presentation, artist Elaine S. Wilson describes her ongoing project, Charting the Wolverine, a series of digital prints about the views from Amtrak’s Wolverine train from Michigan to Chicago.
She examines the process from its inception in 2008 to its current state that features thirty-one “map-prints” and more than 200 watercolors that she’s created. Wilson describes her research of historic maps and atlases, and her adventures on the back roads of Michigan and Indiana along railroad lines making watercolors and drawings.
This program originally aired on Tuesday, March 10, 2026, at 7:00 pm Central Time. It’s available on the Center’s YouTube page at @railphotoart.
About the artist
Elaine S. Wilson’s direct, light-filled landscapes reveal the specific nature of a place through repeated encounters with a site. She values slow looking to discover what is going on there and to find its unexpected lyricism. She often chooses sites related to issues of displacement, disruption and inequity.
Her project Charting the Wolverine has been exhibited nine times in towns and cities across Michigan and Indiana. Copies of all the prints are in the collections of the Stephen Clark Map Library at the University of Michigan, and also at the Library of Congress map division.
Wilson holds her MFA in painting from Yale School of Art (1983) and her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis School of Art (1980). Her work is in the collections of the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Library of Congress, The University of Michigan Office of the President, The University of Michigan Graduate Library Stephen Clark Map Collections, Washington DC Artist Bank, Herman Miller, and Cigna Corp., as well as numerous private collections.
She has exhibited widely with over twenty-five solo shows, and has been included in numerous group exhibitions. She received First Place in the Bethesda Painting Awards (2025), a DC Commission on Arts and Humanities Grant (2016), National Endowment for the Arts Regional Artists Fellowship (1996), and Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (1983).
Wilson’s more than thirty years of teaching include College for Creative Studies in Detroit, University of Michigan School of Art and Design, and Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor.
She lives and works in Silver Spring, Maryland, traveling regularly back to Michigan and Indiana to work on the Wolverine project. She is married with two children and three grandchildren.
