Martha Richardson Fine Art, Boston represents the estate of John Wilson.
John Wilson, a skilled draftsman, painter, sculptor and printmaker, was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts in 1922. Wilson’s artistic development and his achievements are profoundly intertwined with his compassion for the oppressed and his commitment to social progress. Observing and experiencing injustice himself, John Wilson devoted his considerable talents to addressing the painful realities of racial prejudice and social disenfranchisement.
As a young boy, Wilson’s artistic abilities were recognized and nurtured by his teachers at the Roxbury Boys’ Club. After his work was brought to the attention of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA), Wilson received a half scholarship in 1939 for his first year, and full scholarships thereafter. Karl Zerbe, a noted Expressionist, was his teacher and advocate and encouraged him to pursue a career as an artist. Wilson’s 1943 lithograph Grief is a depiction of two people wrapped in an emotionally tight embrace. The print attests to Wilson’s knowledge of two important socially conscious artists, the German Käthe Kollwitz and the Mexican José Clemente Orozco. Their deep connection to the plight of the underclass was an important revelation for the young art student. Wilson was particularly drawn to Orozco, in whom he found for the first time, an artist whose work, both in form and content, paralleled his desire to create compelling images that exposed the oppression experienced by African Americans. Orozco was both a muralist and a printmaker and Wilson recognized the power of these forms of public art; murals could be seen by the masses and prints allowed for the broad distribution of imagery.
By his early 20s, Wilson’s work had been shown in gallery exhibitions, had won numerous awards, and appeared in several prestigious magazines. Before graduating from the SMFA, Wilson sold two works to the Smith College Museum of Art and one to the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Further, in 1943, the first year he entered a work of art in Atlanta University’s groundbreaking Annual Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture and Prints by Negro Artists, Wilson won the John Hope Purchase Award ($250) for his painting Black Soldier and the work entered the University’s Museum collection. Wilson would go on to win more prizes than any other artist in the Atlanta University Annuals.
Wilson graduated from the SMFA in 1944 with the highest honors. From 1945-47, he taught at the Boris Mirski School of Modern Art in Boston and in 1946 at the leftist Samuel Adams School for Social Studies. That same year, three of his works of art were included in the seminal exhibition The Negro Artist Comes of Age at the Albany Institute of History and Art. In 1947, Wilson received a Bachelor of Science degree in Education from Tufts University. An important work from this early period is one of Wilson’s best-known prints, the 1945 Native Son. In this lithograph, he portrays Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son, a novel that deeply moved the artist.
In 1947, Wilson received the prestigious James William Paige Traveling Fellowship from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Although he had hoped to use the grant to study in Mexico, the fellowship required that he travel to Europe to further his artistic studies. Wilson moved to Paris where, during his second year, he worked in Fernand Léger’s studio, a formative experience for the young artist. Under Léger, Wilson expanded upon the formal lessons learned at the Museum School and further explored elements of composition: line, shape, color, and form. Léger’s use of geometric shapes and Cubist concepts influenced Wilson’s intensely humanistic work. Wilson’s portrayals of those left behind by society, to which he brought this newfound understanding of the power of abstraction and visual reduction, became more recognizable as symbols of those causes he increasingly sought to illuminate. Léger’s leftist politics, proletarian subject matter, and his belief in making art broadly accessible both reinforced and expanded Wilson’s artistic direction.
Wilson was deeply concerned by the lack of attention paid by museums to African art and the absence of black figures in traditional Western art. His years in Paris (1947-49) were important not only for the profound effect of Léger, but also for his discovery of the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Man). He visited the museum often and developed a great interest in objects from Africa, Asia, and other non-Western cultures.
Wilson returned to Boston in the spring of 1949 and that summer, he taught art at the leftist Camp Wo-Chi-Ca (Children’s Workers Camp) in New Jersey. His friends Charles White and Jacob Lawrence also taught at the camp and Paul Robeson was a patron who visited each summer to entertain the children. He soon met Julie Kolwitch and the two married in 1950. That same year, one of Wilson’s paintings, The Worker (location unknown), was included in the American Artists Under Thirty-Six exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Wilson received the John Hay Whitney Fellowship and in 1950, he and Julie moved to Mexico City where he studied at the Esmeralda School of Art, the Instituto Politécnico and the Escuela de las Artes del Libro. By the time Wilson arrived, Orozco had died, but he was now able to study the work of the Mexican muralists who were creating large-scale public art with powerful political messages.
In Mexico, as in Paris, Wilson felt free of the racial prejudice that he experienced in the United States. However, he was keenly aware and increasingly disturbed by news reports from the States, which often recounted pervasive violent persecution of African American men. During this period, Wilson painted The Incident, a large-scale mural, now destroyed, depicting a father protecting his wife and child as they witness the lynching of an African American by the Ku Klux Klan. The murdered man’s body is broken, and his bare and twisted oversized foot is pushed out towards the viewer in sharp contrast to the expensive shoes worn by the killers. Another work from this period, The Trial, is a lithograph in which a young black boy stands before three white judges wearing theatrical masks, all of whom loom menacingly above.
The Trial was printed at the Taller de Gráfica Popular (People’s Graphic Workshop), an artist’s printmaking cooperative founded in Mexico City in 1937 by Mexican artists Luis Arenal and Leopoldo Mendez and American artist Pablo O’Higgins. Mexican and other like-minded American artists, such as Charles White and Elizabeth Catlett, were producing prints of socially conscious subjects at the TGP. As an artist with a message, Wilson was attracted to the possibilities of reaching a wider audience through the distribution of prints.
Trabajador, another of Wilson’s prints made at the TGP, is a powerful image of a bricklayer. According to Stacy I. Morgan, this print demonstrates “both the modernist economy of form that one finds in the Blvd de Strasbourg and the special concern with working-class citizenry that characterized the artwork of the Taller de Gráfica Popular. In this lithograph, Wilson takes special care to articulate the skill and precision with which the craftsman executes his task by granting prominent size and detail to the figure’s hands.” (Rethinking Social Realism, African American Art and Literature, 1930-1953, 2004, p. 135).
Wilson returned to the States in 1956, first to Chicago where he produced illustrations for a packinghouse workers union, then to New York where he taught art in various junior high and high schools. Wilson had little time for his own work during this period between the many courses required for his teaching certification, teaching itself and his young family. In 1964, he returned to Massachusetts, settling in Brookline, to teach art at Boston University’s School of Fine and Applied Arts. He served as a consultant to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston during the founding of the National Center of Afro-American Artists. Wilson’s works were included in the 1970 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston exhibition Afro-American Artists: New York and Boston, in the 1987 retrospective exhibition of his work at the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists and in many other exhibitions at major institutions. Wilson returned to printmaking in Boston, working at both Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop, a non-profit cooperative on the West Side of Manhattan, and Impressions Workshop in Boston.
John Wilson is celebrated for his use of dark tones to create an intensely sculptural quality to his drawings and prints. Beginning in the early 1970’s, Wilson began to envision a sculpted, monumental head, rising out of the earth, inspired by the colossal Mesoamerican Olmec heads unearthed in south central Mexico and the Buddhas he saw when a student at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He produced numerous drawings based on this vision and in 1982 Wilson was awarded two major commissions allowing him to fulfill this dream. The first, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, awarded by Buffalo Arts Commission, is an 8-foot monumental bronze head of civil rights leader perched upon a stone wall (erected in 1983). The second was a commission for the 7-foot sculpture Eternal Presence for the grounds of the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Roxbury (installed October 1987). In 1985, Wilson won a national competition to create a memorial bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. for the U.S. Capitol Building, Washington, DC; Coretta Scott King was an advisor to the selection committee and visited Wilson during at his studio while making the sculpture. And, in the same year, he won the competition for a full-scale sculpture for Roxbury Community College, Boston (Father and Son Reading, unveiled in 1990). Wilson retired in 1986 from Boston University.
In 1999, Wilson was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts, conferred by the Art Institute of Boston and the following year he received the Painters and Sculptures Grant Award from The Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York. John Wilson passed away on January 22, 2015 at his home surrounded by his family.
Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson, a major retrospective co-organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, will open in Boston on February 8, 2025 followed by New York on September 20, 2025.
