Around the start of 1986, John Wilson wrapped the bust he’d sculpted of Martin Luther King Jr. in blankets and an old sleeping bag and placed the 3-foot-tall bronze head in the back of his Mazda wagon. Then the 63-year-old Brookline artist drove the statute—and his wife and son—to Washington, D.C.
“My hope is that we’ll be reminded of both the dream and the reality,” King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, said as she unveiled the statue inside the U.S. Capitol rotunda during a ceremony on Jan. 16, 1986, just days before the celebration of the first federal Martin Luther King Jr. Day. “We have much work yet to do.”
The statue stood atop a 5-foot-tall, black marble pedestal—and was said to be the first portrait of a prominent Black American at the Capitol. Wilson had won a national competition for the commission. It was his most prominent project yet.
“I’d been to Washington, but never inside the Capitol,” Wilson told The Boston Globe at the time. “Somehow, it seemed like the epitome of the seat of power, and it alienated me. I never felt part of it. But when I delivered the sculpture that changed. I felt, ‘A piece of me is in that building.’”
Wilson did not directly participate in Civil Rights Movement marches and protests, but Black liberation and dignity was a focus of his art, and through his teaching and Black art initiatives he worked directly to create more opportunities for Black people. King was “a very important symbol for me,” he told Patricia Hills in 1995 for his exhibition “Dialogue: John Wilson/Joseph Norman” at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.
“I wanted people to recognize him but also I wanted to suggest the intangible energy and strength, this sense of dogged strength he had that allowed him to carry out these impossible campaigns,” Wilson told the Globe in 1995. “He was able to use his verbal skills to convince masses of ordinary people to do these extraordinary things.”
“Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson,” at the Museum of Fine Arts from Feb. 8 to June 22, 2025, brings together 110 of Wilson’s artworks—including drawings and a model for his Capitol portrait of King. The exhibition was organized by the MFA and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art—curated by Edward Saywell and Patrick Murphy of the MFA, Leslie King Hammond of the Maryland Institute College of Art, and Jennifer of the Met. Many of the paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and illustrated books come from the MFA’s collection, including more than 20 new acquisitions being exhibited at the museum for the first time.
Western museums and historians endeavoring to recover neglected careers of African American artists over the past decade or so have focused mainly on the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Power artists of the 1960s and ‘70s. Wilson, falling between those generations, hasn’t been included, so far remaining an esteemed figure locally, but little remembered nationally.
Wilson “dedicated his career to imagining different futures, exposing injustices, and advocating for authentic and positive representation of Black Americans,” the Boston museum argues. “For more than six decades, he made powerful works that continue to resonate with the persistent realities of disenfranchisement and inequality.”
“Essentially,” Wilson’s wife Julia told the Globe when he died in his Brookline home at age 92 in 2015, “he felt that his main objective as an artist was to deliver a message to people about Black dignity, about racial justice, about poor people trying to get a better deal in life.”
Did Not Include You
“Art school, although I was moved by the expressive power of the great art works of the Western world that I studied, I also experienced a sense of alienation and ambivalence,” Wilson said in a statement for the 1987 Museum of Fine Arts exhibition “American Artists: Then and Now.” “As a Black person, I saw no image representing me. The subject matter of these works seemed to reflect the attitude of the official world around me at that time; namely that Black people and their special experience were irrelevant and unimportant. As an artist I was trying to express things that were real to me. To do so I had to find a way in my work to cope with these special experiences that were forced on me as a Black person and ignored by the larger world around me.”
Wilson was born in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood in 1922, a couple years after his parents arrived from the sugar plantations of British Guiana on the northern coast of South America (since 1966 the independent nation of Guyana). His father, an ardent follower of Marcus Garvey’s Black nationalism, “wanted us to have a better life so he encouraged us to maximize whatever we wanted to do,” Wilson told the Globe in 1995.
Wilson won a full scholarship to Boston’s Museum School (now the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University), where he studied art in the first half of the 1940s, then, recognizing that many artists make their living through teaching, earned a degree in education from Tufts University in 1947.
Wilson’s art depicted himself, family, friends and the Black community around him—as well as being socially engaged from early on. His Museum School teacher Karl Zerbe, a German Jewish expressionist painter who’d fled Nazi oppression, made him aware of socially conscious painters. Wilson read Marxist philosophy, Black American poet Langston Hughes, and Black American author Richard Wright’s stories of violent discrimination against African Americans. He felt his eyes opening to the fact that the United States “promised freedom and opportunity for anyone who worked hard, etc., etc., but clearly if you are Black you realize that these nice sounding phrases did not include you,” Wilson told Patricia Hills in 1995 for his MFA exhibition “Dialogue: John Wilson/Joseph Norman.”
”What they were doing in writings, I wanted to do with my visual art,” Wilson told the Globe in 1995.
In Wilson’s 1945 lithograph “Streetcar Scene,” a lone Black man sits among white women as he rides the street car to work at the Boston Navy Yard where World War II brought a boom in jobs—and temporarily lifted some racist barriers. Wilson once noted, “I resented the fact that almost everyone on my block was on welfare until they needed us in the shipyards and factories.”
Wilson drew scenes of World War II—like his 1943 lithograph “Deliver Us From Evil,” made for a school assignment and published in 1945 in the American Marxist cultural and political journal New Masses, which put Nazi atrocities side-by-side with whites lynching of Blacks in the United States. “There was less consciousness then of the oppression of Black people simply because it wasn’t officially recognized as, say, was the highly publicized persecution of Jews in Europe,” Wilson told Elton Fax for his 1971 book “Seventeen Black Artists.”
Wilson’s 1945 painting “Black Despair” depicts his brother William, in uniform, serving at a military base in the Jim Crow South, with his head in his arms, collapsed dejected onto a table, his fists clinched. “He was very depressed,” Wilson later said. “Black soldiers could hardly leave the base because… they were subject to all the indignities of Jim Crow, the segregated buses, the segregated everything.”
Wilson made prints inspired by Richard Wright’s “characters struggling to survive with dignity,” as he later described it.
“It was then,” he told Fax, “that my life began to make sense.”
Revolution Against Evil
Wilson left for France in fall 1947 on a Museum School fellowship. There he felt a release from American racism. “In Europe your acceptance as an individual is far more direct,” Wilson told Fax.
Wilson studied with the French artist Fernand Léger in Paris. Artworks from that period, show Wilson trying on Leger’s geometric, mechanical cubism—its heavy black outlines, primary colors pallet and flattened space. “Leger in France helped me to understand how to use the visual elements of color, line and shape in my work,” Wilson said in a statement for the 1987 Museum of Fine Arts exhibition “American Artists: Then and Now.” And at Paris’s Musee de l’Homme (Museum of Humanity), Wilson drew inspiration from African and Asian art, seized by French colonials, that inspired the French modernists.
After a couple years, Wilson returned to the United States. A 1949 photo shows Wilson as art director at Camp Wo-Chi-Ca, a socialist “workers children’s camp” in New Jersey. In New York, he met a white teacher by the name of Julia (Julie) Kowitch, whom he married in 1950.
For safety, the interracial couple traveled in separate cars through the violently segregated U.S. South on their way Mexico, where Wilson had another study fellowship. Living in Mexico from 1950 to 1956, where their first child, Rebecca (Becky) was born in September 1953, they met the celebrated muralists Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros and Wilson made prints with the Taller de Gráfica Popular (the People’s Graphic Workshop).
“You can’t look at the great Mexican muralists without being conscious of their expressions of revolution against the evils of existing social orders,” Wilson told Fax.
Wilson’s 1951 lithograph “The Trial” depicts a courtroom scene in which three white judges with big fists and blank eyes loom over a small Black man as a white woman sits on the stand. Wilson said it was inspired by the 1931 Scottsboro Boys trial, in which nine African American teens were falsely accused of raping two white women. Nine were sentenced to death, until the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a retrial. The title also brings to mind Franz Kafka’s novel “The Trial” about being trapped in a nightmarishly rigged judicial system. The image of the cornered man can fill you with dread of the violence of vigilantes—and of the courts.
“Witnessing Humanity” includes Wilson’s studies from 1952 for a fresco titled “The Incident” (since destroyed) that he painted for a class in Mexico City. Wilson told Fax it depicted “an incident involving Ku Klux Klan terror.” Four hooded Klansmen abduct a Black man as a cross burns and a rope hangs over a tree. In the foreground, a Black man watches the attack out his window and guards his wife and child with a rifle.
Wilson’s people take on some of the monumentality and golden hues of the Mexican muralists—as well as art by socially-engaged African American artists like Charles White and Elizabeth Catlett, who both also spent time in Mexico.
In a statement for the 1987 Museum of Fine Arts exhibition “American Artists: Then and Now,” Wilson said, “The work of the Mexican painters gave me ideas about how to create an art that related to the everyday lives of the ordinary person.”
Back To Boston
Wilson moved to the Boston suburb of Brookline in 1964 to teach art at Boston University (he’d teach there until 1986), after stints making commercial art for a meatpackers’ union in Chicago in 1957 and teaching and making commercial art in New York.
“One of the Greater Boston area’s most distinguished Negro artists,” Globe critic Edgar Driscoll Jr. wrote when Wilson exhibited at Cambridge’s Gropper Art Gallery in May 1967, “he packs a world of feeling into his simple, direct recordings of the people who knows best.”
While mainline white modernist art pursued abstraction, many Black artists, like Wilson, continued to pursue versions of realism—that could seem retrograde to those who overlooked the reasons behind it. Boston University’s art program, which taught rigorous technique for personal expression, was also sometimes seen this way—led by socially-engaged Jewish Boston Expressionist teachers and where Philip Guston, the Abstract Expressionist turned stumblebum cartoon expressionist painter of Klansmen, was a visiting lecturer from 1973 to ’78.
“Art should attempt to interpret something outside itself, not just itself,” Wilson told the Globe in 1971. The realism was necessarily for Black artists to address violent white supremacism and to reclaim how Black people were depicted. “When I was growing up the only images of Black people you saw were minstrel-like clowns,” Wilson said.
Direct depictions of racist oppression faded from Wilson’s work as he focused more on sensitive, nuanced portraits of his wife and children, his brothers, and friends that asserted Black beauty and Black dignity. Wilson found philosophical kinship in Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel “Invisible Man.” “In my youth, the Black man was an invisible American,” Wilson wrote in a note for a talk at Boston University in 1970. “I sense now that I was trying to make Black people become really visible, in a world that would only see us (when it bothered to look) as undeveloped.”
One of the questions at the heart of Wilson’s work is how to embody Blackness. Darkness becomes one of his motifs—as well as a calm, heroic monumentality that embodies the weight of history and a steadfastness of purpose.
Wilson was “working in a fairly traditionalist manner,” Driscoll wrote in 1967. “His draughtsmanship is assured. So, too, is his control of light and shade, volume and line. Indeed, there is a sculptural quality to many of these drawings that is nothing short of monumental. Often the artist places his faces in shadow, so that they become symbols of mankind as well as specific individuals.”
The Answer
Wilson began feeling his way toward sculpture via his drawings. Prints and drawings from the 1960s and early ‘70s of a Black man cuddling his child in his arms was a theme that eventually led to Wilson’s 1990 bronze “Father and Child Reading” at Roxbury Community College. The 7-foot-tall sculpture depicts a seated man reading a book to the boy encircled and protected by his arms. Wilson called it “a homage to my parents who passed on their love of reading to me.” Countering American society’s relentless demonification of Black men, Wilson presents a monument to the tender love of Black fatherhood.
Monumental heads began to be a focus—inspired by large stone Buddhas at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and massive stone Olmec heads that Wilson saw in Mexico in the 1950s. His 1972 black crayon drawing “Study for Monumental Head / Study for the Sculpture “Eternal Presence’” is a 3-foot-tall drawing of a boldly outlined head. Wilson told the Globe in 1986 that he tried to “sum up the universality of [Martin Luther] King’s ideas, the power of his nonviolent philosophy” in the 8-foot-tall bronze head he created as a monument at Buffalo’s Martin Luther King Jr. Park in 1983. Wilson then sculpted the portrait bust of King for the U.S. Capitol in 1986, with the head leaning down to engage you directly, to look you in the eye.
Three drawings—in charcoal, pastel and crayon—from 1972 depict his eldest daughter Becky’s friend Roz Springer. “She was like living sculpture,” Wilson said. When Wilson was commissioned in 1982 to create a sculpture for the grounds of the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Roxbury, he began simplifying the drawings, streamlining them to Springer’s essential features, that he began working in clay, that would eventually become “Eternal Presence.”
Wilson helped establish the Boston Negro Artists’ Association in 1966. And he was a supporter of the National Center for Afro-American Artists, which the great Boston arts maven Elma Lewis founded in 1968 (building upon the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts that she founded in 1950). He helped her set up its visual arts teaching program, helped garner the MFA’s financial support for the institution, and served on its board of directors.
Wilson’s 7-foot-tall, 8-ton bronze head, “Eternal Presence”—or “Big Head,” as locals have nicknamed it—was unveiled at the institution on Oct. 4, 1987, to mark the 350th anniversary of the presence of Black people in Massachusetts. “I’m not simply trying to make a likeness of an individual. I’m trying to use the head as a metaphor of what human beings are about,” Wilson told the Globe in 1995.
“To me my experience as a Black person has given me a special way of looking at the world and a special identity with others who experience some injustices,” Wilson told the Globe in 1995. “…I don’t sit down and think ‘Well, I have to do a picture on Black people today.’ What I’m doing to some extent in my art is exorcising some of these conflicting kinds of messages that this racist world has given me. … Some of the themes I have dealt with are not because I sat down and said I wanted to make a political statement but because of emotional experiences. I grew up in a world that said I could be killed if I stepped out of line. . ..There is a core of anger and frustration I have to vent.”
“To get at the essence of what I was after I had to get at something in its own space. I needed something that would confront the onlooker,” Wilson told the Globe in 1995. He worked in sculpture and large because ”I want them to be images that can’t be dismissed. I want them to confront people. I want to create something that can’t be camouflaged into some background.”
“It was my answer,” Wilson once said, “to all the omissions, the things I did not see in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. I wanted to make a Black image that you could not ignore.”
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