John Wilson at The Met: Witnessing humanity and defying erasure through his canvas | amNewYork

"John Wilson's name first appeared to me as an apparition my father's name, my beloved father, who stood as a defiant beam of light against the suffocating stereotypes America imposed upon Blackness. To see the same name inscribed upon canvases, prints, and bronzes was to recognize the continuation of that defiancean inheritance of fire. Wilson's art, forged across decades of upheaval, did not merely document history; it bent history into form, forcing the viewer to confront truths too terrifying to remain invisible."

"By the time he was sketching in the 1930s and 1940s, Nazi Germany was showing America its own reflection: state-sanctioned violence, racialized extermination, the eradication of undesirables. Wilson understood, as few did, that the machinery of hatred is never foreign. It is homegrown, imported and exported, tailored for the times. He picked up charcoal not as a student's tool, but as a weaponhis black strokes cutting through centuries of erasure."

"Then came Mexico, where the muralists cracked him open. Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco modeled an art that belonged not to gilded salons but to the walls of factories and schoolsan art of revolution, of bloodied workers and gods with calloused hands. Fernand Leger's modernist muscularity taught Wilson to see the figure not just as flesh but as structure: engineered, monumental."

John Wilson was born in 1922 in Roxbury and developed art as resistance to American racism and global fascism. His early charcoal drawings carried political charge, treating mark-making as a weapon against erasure. Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco and modernist Fernand Léger influenced his sense of public art and structural figure-making. Wilson focused on intimate violence within American life, producing works that transform historical trauma into visual force. The Incident (1948–49) exemplifies his commitment to confronting lynching and communal complicity. His sculptures, prints, and paintings bend history into form and demand recognition of painful truths.

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