John Wilson’s Art Explores Humanity and Activism at the MFA Boston

The bronze maquette and a forceful black and white pastel study done in 1985 for this sculpture is included in the exhibition Witnessing Humanity, the Art of John Wilson, opening on February 8, 2025 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Organized in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, and including over 110 paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures, it is the largest exhibition of the artist’s work ever shown. 

In an exclusive conversation with Art & Object, exhibition curator and MFA Boston Chair of Prints and Drawings Edward Saywell discussed Wilson’s deep ties to Boston. “Wilson was born in Roxbury [Massachusetts], a first generation African American. 

His parents immigrated here from British Guiana before the Great Depression… He had deep ties to the community and championed social justice… In thinking about the title of the show, we wanted to celebrate Wilson’s ‘business of looking’ how he saw humanity in all its complexities.”

At a time when the MFA was not known for collecting local, living artists, it was surprising when Saywell revealed, “The MFA acquired its first work by Wilson in 1947, soon after he graduated from the Museum School and Tufts— it was a 1945 lithograph, Streetcar Scene, which will be in the show.”

John Wilson began teaching at the School for the Arts at Boston University in 1964, the same year I was an undergraduate student there. A decade earlier, Martin Luther King attended B.U., graduating from the School of Theology. The president, John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated the year before (1963) and King was killed four years after that. 

It was a time of growing civil unrest, and we were all deeply embroiled in the civil rights, racial inequality, and anti-Vietnam war movements that soon engulfed our campus and spread across the country. To understand the work of John Wilson is to understand the time and place he lived.

While I knew John Wilson as a quiet man and a respected artist, I never had him as an instructor. He had a devoted following among his students, and there is a photo in the exhibition of Wilson teaching at B.U., taken around 1970. Saywell was excited about the opportunities for connection that Wilson’s engagement as an innovative educator and a committed community activist offered the curatorial team. 

“We are partnering with B.U. in a program that is bringing students from a drawing class, a course in visual narrative, a two-semester course that Wilson had also taught, to look at Wilson’s work and respond to it.” Some of his most powerful and overt political and anti-war statements came in the form of his work in the 1940s when he was still a student. 

Works like the lithographs Deliver Us From Evil (1943) and War Machine (1944), the black crayon drawing War Scene (1940), and Study for Black Soldier (1943) done for the oil painting Black Soldier (1943) were created at an age when most artists were still honing their craft, trying to figure out their own reasons for making art. 

In 1947, Wilson won a fellowship to study in Paris with the cubist Fernand Léger (1881-1955). The impact of cubism on Wilson is obvious in the color lithographs Mode of Production (1949) and Boulevard de Strasbourg (1950). 

However, some of his most intimate and powerful work is in portraiture. The stoic strength of his early oil on canvas Self Portrait (1943) echoes in all his portraits of family and friends like Roz (1972), Richie No.1(1981), and Gabrielle (1998), painted and drawn through 6 decades. 

Eternal Presence (1985-1998), a seven-foot tall, monumental public sculpture referred to lovingly by the locals as The Big Head, stands outside the National Center for Afro-American Artists (NCAAA) in Roxbury near where Wilson was born.

This provided the curators with another link to community engagement. “We compiled a video of individuals interviewed in the neighborhood who helped with the cleaning of the sculpture. It will be included… One of the things we learned in talking to artists and historians who knew him was the importance of his illustration work and children’s books, so we made that work a much larger section of the show.” 

In closing, Saywell expressed these thoughts, “So much of Wilson’s work is about refusing invisibility. One of the most important things that motivated us was giving Wilson a national platform. Even though he sold work to MoMA and us and others in the 1940s and participated in the Atlanta Annuals and won awards, he was not recognized as he should have been. We hope this will put him on a national stage.” Given this showcase, Wilson’s powerful work will do the rest.