Down in the storage vaults of the Maryland Historical Society, Fred Wilson found a curious juxtaposition: an 18th century sedan chair belonging to the last governor of Maryland appointed by the King of England, and a whipping post.

What do they have to do with African-American history in Maryland? The role of the whipping post is obvious, that of the sedan chair a little less so, but it was no doubt carried by blacks.

Wilson was searching the society's collection for objects to include in "Mining the Museum," his just-opened installation resulting from what surely constitutes the most unusual art collaboration in Baltimore: a joint project of Baltimore's oldest, most traditional museum (the MHS), its youngest, most radical museum (the Museum for Contemporary Arts) and a New York conceptual artist (Wilson) whose specialty is exhibits relating to the museum experience.

Last year, for instance, he put on view in a New York art gallery four mannequins of blacks dressed in uniforms in the styles of four New York museums. The point was that that's pretty much all the black presence you ever see in museums: not art by blacks, or art with blacks in it, or blacks on the curatorial staffs, just blacks as guards. And you don't see them, because guards become part of the background, like the walls.

He tells the story of brunching last year at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York with a group of docents whom he was going to take on a tour of one of the museum's exhibits. "I told them it was going to be a little different because I'd be in costume. Then I excused myself and changed into a Whitney guard's uniform and went to where the tour was to begin. The group came in and were milling around, and not a single one of them recognized me."

At 37, Wilson has become celebrated for deconstructing the usual museum experience in order to analyze and criticize museums' traditional practices and attitudes, and especially how they reinforce racial and ethnic stereotypes. Or, as he puts it, "I do something outrageous or absurd to break out of what we see in museums, and make people think a little more."

Until now, however, his installations have been in galleries, with reproductions of museum artifacts. Until now, the Museum for Contemporary Arts (or the Contemporary) has staged its exhibits in empty, abandoned spaces: a onetime ballroom, a closed bus terminal, the former home of a car dealership.

This time, Wilson, whom the Contemporary brought to the historical society, has been given carte blanche to use its collection, with which he has assembled an installation about the African-American and American Indian experience in Maryland and also about the historical society.

If that sounds like a bomb ready to blow up in the society's face, people there don't see it that way.

"We really have nothing to lose," says chief curator Jennifer Goldsborough. "As a collaboration it lets us a little off the hook." That is, even if the installation criticizes the historical society, the society gets credit for its broad-mindedness and daring in allowing itself to be criticized with its own collection. But, Goldsborough adds, "The more we've gotten to know Fred, the safer we feel. And besides, if it isn't a little challenge there's probably not much point in doing it."

Image-changing

And, says society director Charles Lyle, it offers an opportunity for the historical society to counter its own stereotype. "Our image is very conservative. We hope to break down the stereotypes of what this museum's collections are and bring in ++ people who normally wouldn't come here." He refers to the contemporary art community as well as the African-American and American Indian communities. And the meeting of the American Association of Museums in Baltimore later this month will bring in 4,000 museum professionals from all over the country, giving the project national exposure.

As for the Contemporary, it will get exposure to the historical society's regular audience, a group that probably hasn't been seen in significant numbers at its past shows. "Both [institutions] will have gained a very new kind of audience," says Lisa Corrin, the Contemporary's assistant director and curator of "Mining the Museum."

The whole idea began early last year, when the Contemporary had an exhibit of Soviet photography in one of the buildings of the empty Greyhound bus terminal on Centre Street just behind the society's buildings.

As Corrin remembers, "Charles Lyle called us up and acted as a sort of welcome wagon. We met with him, and he said, 'Wouldn't it be great if we could work together?' "

The idea was immediately appealing as an attraction of opposites, and Corrin had been aware of Fred Wilson for some time. "I thought it would be particularly appropriate for us to do something with him, because one of our roles is to be constantly questioning what a museum is and the relationship between how we show what we show and how it relates to people. We address what does it mean to be a museum."

Using real artifacts

But it would also be an opportunity for Wilson "to move in a new direction," Corrin says. "It would be not just Fred Wilson doing Fred Wilsons, but to replace the reproductions that he had traditionally used with real artifacts."

(The idea has mushroomed. Before the show even opened here, Wilson had offers from museums in Indianapolis and Seattle to do similar projects with their collections.)

The Contemporary didn't want to force the historical society on Wilson, however. Corrin brought him to Baltimore and showed him all the major museums, and he chose the historical society as the one he most wanted to work with. Both because of its "variety of objects," being a museum and library of Maryland history, and because of "the fact that the institution is perceived to be a place where a living artist has no place," he says.

The Historical Society not only agreed to be the project site, it gave Wilson "the uncensored use of the entire permanent collection," says Corrin, "with the one proviso that [any individual object] had to be able to fit up the stairs."

With the two museums in agreement on the project, the Contemporary raised more than $20,000 to fund it, including $15,000 from the Andy Warhol Foundation. With the help of two research aides, Wilson "mined" the society's collections beginning in November and for the past few weeks worked intensely with the help of the society's staff to create his installation, which opened Friday.

A minority viewpoint

Wilson is African-American on his father's side and on his mother's side partly of Carib (native West Indian) and partly of English ancestry. He created a work investigating both the African-American and American Indian experience in Maryland.

The installation, he says, is about those groups' "marginalization," and as well a "critique of the museum environment and its way of displaying artifacts. It will talk about the notion of museum as much as about the objects themselves."

But, he points out, "I'm not going to criticize this museum specifically." Nor is the work just about Maryland. "It's about history, about art, really about America." And "I hope it won't be too despairing."

It's important, the artist thinks, that the public not view what he has done as an exhibit he has curated. Rather, the whole thing constitutes an installation, a single work of art.

And what all is in it? The whipping post? The sedan chair? Cigar store Indians? Black portraitist Joshua Johnson's portrait of a white family? Doll houses? Decoys left over from the last exhibit in the same space? Broadsides seeking runaway slaves? Benjamin Banneker's astronomy charts?

Maybe some of the above, maybe all, maybe none. Wilson doesn't want to be too specific about all that, as he thinks surprise an important element in the visitor's experience. But essential to the exhibit, aside from the objects themselves, is the way they're put together and how they're labeled and presented. He hopes the experience will be exemplary of what he thinks museum experience in general ought to be: "Not all intellectual, but emotional, visceral, as well. I want to jar your sense of what a museum is about."