John Wilson’s Art of Black Humanity
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston offers career retrospective of the late BU professor, complete with a comic by CFA students
John Wilson with an unidentified student in a BU art studio, circa 1966. Wilson was a College of Fine Arts professor from 1964 to 1986. Photo by Don Brewster, from The Hub, Boston University College of Liberal Arts, 1966. From the University Archives Collection, Boston University Libraries, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.
John Wilson’s Art of Black Humanity
MFA offers career retrospective of the late BU professor, complete with a comic by CFA students
This article was originally published in BU Today on February 25, 2025. By Joel Brown
EXCERPT
The soul of John Wilson’s work is an insistence that Black people be fully seen in all their humanity. Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson, the largest-ever exhibition of work by the late painter, sculptor, and Boston University professor has just opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and will be on view through June 22.
“Wilson spoke very early on as a student of how the Black community was effectively invisible” in art and in the art world, says Edward Saywell, the MFA’s chair of prints and drawings, one of the exhibition’s four cocurators. “How he did not see images of the Black community that had dignity, gravitas, presence, and agency, and how so many of the images instead were ones that were caricatured, dehumanized.”
“One of the constants throughout his work is the empathy and humanity that you feel,” Saywell says. “It’s one thing to be able to create a portrait that is sort of like a mimetic representation of somebody. It’s quite another to go beyond that, to really capture the soul, the spirit, the humanity, of the individual.”
Witnessing Humanity will move to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in September. Accompanying its run at the MFA are two projects by groups of students from the College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts, where Wilson taught for more than 20 years.
Co-organized by the MFA and the Met, the exhibition in the MFA’s Lois B. and Michael K. Torf Gallery comprises about 110 works, including drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, and illustrated books, most pointing to Wilson’s continued artistic exploration of Black lives.
At its center is a scaled-down bronze maquette (or model) for his monumental sculpture Eternal Presence, a revered landmark, installed in 1987, on the grounds of the National Center of Afro-American Artists (NCAAA) in Roxbury, Mass., where Wilson grew up. Known as the Big Head to local residents, the piece radiates dignity and beauty. Though the maquette is located near the end of Witnessing Humanity, a large cutout in a wall frames the piece for visitors as soon as they enter the exhibition.
Wilson (1922-2015) never quite got the level of acclaim he deserved when he was alive, because of a number of factors, and the exhibition is in part an attempt to redress that.
“It’s important to give people like that flowers when they’re still around,” says Joel Christian Gill (CFA’04), a CFA associate professor and chair of the School of Visual Arts MFA in visual narrative. “But, you know, better late than never.”
A dozen of Gill’s visual narrative students produced In Dialogue with Wilson: Comics Reflections on a Boston Visionary, a comic book in which each responds artistically to Wilson’s work. Created to be handed out at the exhibition, the comic is already in its third printing.
Students in first-year drawing classes at the School of Visual Arts—classes Wilson taught when he was on the faculty (1964 to 1986)—have also been invited by the museum to encounter the works and are producing their own in response, which will be on display in the Commonwealth Gallery at CFA March 17 through April 18.
“What we found very exciting about this is that the MFA reached out to us to really make this opportunity happen,” says Marc Schepens, director of the School of Visual Arts and a CFA senior lecturer in art, painting. “Historically, we’ve always worked quite closely with the MFA on basic things, these partnerships that have always existed. But on this we really started, as a school and a college, to connect with the museum on a higher level.”
read the full story in bu today
Boston Globe feature
John Wilson left a monumental legacy. The museum world is finally carving out a place for it.
John Wilson taught at Boston University School of Visual Arts for two decades. Earlier this month the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston unveiled ‘Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson,’ the largest-ever retrospective of the Roxbury native’s work.