Now open at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston is Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson, one of the largest exhibitions ever mounted for the work of Wilson, who blended culture and politics into works as varied as lithography and paintings to sculpture and book illustrations.
The museum has had a long relationship with Wilson, who lived in Massachusetts for much of his life. MFA Boston acquired its first piece by the artist in 1946, still early in his long career, and has presented several exhibitions, including a pivotal show juxtaposing Wilson’s works with those of Joseph Norman.
John Wilson (1922-2015), Deliver Us From Evil, 1943. Lithograph. Gift of John Wilson’s family. © Estate of John Wilson. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
“We made a very strong commitment to build our collection of Wilson’s prints, and sculpture and illustrated books here a number of years ago. We have felt incredibly strongly that Wilson was not known on a national level in the way that his work deserves. And so a conversation began about how we might help to course correct that by undertaking a large-scale retrospective of his work,” says Witnessing Humanity curator Edward Saywell, chair of prints and drawings at the museum. “We have the sincerest hope that we can introduce Wilson’s work to new generations, but also hopefully get his work into the canon that we truly, truly believe it should be in. [One of the] key themes and threads in his work, something that is incredibly prescient and relevant today, is his visibility of the Black experience in America. He focused upon issues of racial inequity, economic precarity and insecurity, of social injustice and disenfranchisement. One of his driving purposes was to create what he described as powerful images that would quite literally force others to see the world the way he experienced it.”
John Wilson (1922-2015), The Young Americans: Gabrielle, 1975. Colored crayon and charcoal on paper. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. © Estate of John Wilson. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
John Wilson (1922-2015), Maquette for Eternal Presence, modeled 1985, cast 1998. Bronze. William Francis Warden Fund. © Estate of John Wilson. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The exhibition, which was undertaken with the partnership of the Metropolitan Museum of New York, is broken into four sections: The first gallery focuses on Wilson’s frustration with the lack of positive representations of Black people in art history. The second gallery is devoted to the six-year period the artist spent in Mexico in 1950s, which includes his interest in murals that were popular in Mexico at the time. The third gallery features themes of friendship, family and mentorship. And finally, in the fourth gallery, the museum will focus on some of Wilson’s most popular works, including his images of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and also his reduced-scale bronze maquette for Eternal Presence, the monumental sculpture installed in 1987 on the grounds of the National Center of Afro-American Artists.
John Wilson (1922-2015), Oracle, 1965. Black ink, black chalk and collage on paper. Yale University Art Gallery, Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund. © Estate of John Wilson. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Wilson was born in Massachusetts in 1922, during a time of deep racial disparity. He witnessed the Civil Rights Movement and the rise and fall of MLK and Malcolm X, but he also saw the world drastically change throughout the second half of his life until his death in 2015. The changing of the times are reflected in his work, and in the exhibition.
“This is something that is really evident in the title of the show Witnessing Humanity,” Saywell says. “He dedicated his life’s work to exposing injustices at a time when he was a literal witness to some of the most turbulent years of the 20th century, years marked by wars and upheaval. And much of Wilson’s work reflects his anger and his distress at the wrenching effects of racial prejudice and disenfranchisement over those years.” —
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