Metropolitan Museum presents first New York survey of John Wilson’s art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has opened "Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson," the first New York survey of the artist John Wilson (1922–2015), featuring more than 100 works in a show that originated at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Wilson, whose parents immigrated from Guyana, grew up near Boston and enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1939.

Early lithographs from 1943 such as "Breadwinner," "Adolescence" and "Deliver Us From Evil" display political themes and personal memory; the Museum of Modern Art acquired "Adolescence" in 1944. He later studied in Paris with exposure to Fernand Leger and African art at the Musee de l'Homme, and in 1950 spent seven years in Mexico working alongside leading muralists and printmakers.

After returning to the United States and settling in Boston in 1964, Wilson began to combine abstraction with political imagery. He largely stopped printmaking in the early 1970s and turned to sculpture, producing studies for a mural titled "The Young Americans," life-size crayon studies, a six-foot bronze father-and-child work on the Roxbury Community College campus and monumental portrait commissions, including a large bronze head of Martin Luther King Jr.

installed in a Buffalo park in 1982 and a bust that has been on view in the U.S. Capitol rotunda since 1986.

Key Topics

Culture, John Wilson, Witnessing Humanity, Metropolitan Museum, Mfa Boston, Roxbury