Depictions of mothers with children proliferate Western art history. For 500 years, the Madonna and Child along with the Pietà were two of the most popular subjects in painting and sculpture. Fathers and sons, however, have nearly been absent.
Try thinking of one major historic artwork showcasing a father with child.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston fills that void courtesy of John Wilson (1922–2015). Wilson is best known for producing monumental sculptural figures, but its his drawings, paintings, and sculptures of fathers with children that stand out most distinctly during “Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson” (through June 22, 2025), the largest-ever exhibition of the artist’s work.
“Family was paramount for Wilson as is evident from his many depictions of his own family and his exploration of the subject of father and child—in particular the theme of a father and child reading together,” Patrick Murphy, exhibition co-curator and the MFA’s Lia and William Poorvu Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings, told Forbes.com. “Wilson’s father instilled in him from childhood the importance of reading. Images of a father and child are vanishingly rare (in art history). For me, it’s one of the most interesting and personally affecting aspects of his work.”
Wilson’s parents were immigrants from British Guiana (now Guyana) who struggled with steady employment in Boston due to racist hiring practices after the Great Depression. While his mother was employed as a domestic worker, Wilson’s father focused on raising the children.
Wilson’s caring African American fathers attending to their children do more than expose a void in art history, more importantly, they expose a stereotype of absentee, negligent Black dads. Born in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, a working-class area with a large Black population, Wilson’s art throughout his life, be it grandiose public monuments viewed by thousands of people daily, or intimate drawings, imagined different futures, exposed injustices, and advocated for authentic and positive representation of Black Americans.
Frustrated with the absence of positive representations of Black people in art history textbooks and cultural institutions, including the MFA, Wilson responded by providing images of Black dignity while addressing the painful realities of racial prejudice and social injustice.
“He saw his art as a political act, a means to bring the visibility of Black experience to the fore,” Edward Saywell, exhibition co-curator and the MFA’s Chair of Prints and Drawings, said when the exhibition was announced.
“Wilson was deeply influenced by the work of the Mexican Muralists—Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros—because of their elevation of the everyday worker, and the inherently democratic nature of their chosen media—public murals and printmaking, particularly lithography,” Murphy explained. “He wanted to do for African American stories what the Mexican Muralists did for ordinary Mexicans.”
Wilson was so enamored with the Mexican Muralists he and his wife, Julie Kowitch, moved to Mexico City in 1950 following a stint in Paris.
“As in Paris, he found he could get along in Mexico without the racism his encountered in the States, but this was also the same moment that the Civil Rights movement was heating up—the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the murder of Emmett Till,” Murphy continued. “Wilson found it challenging to make art from afar that expressed the experience of African Americans in the States, and he and family returned to the U.S. in 1956.”
Considering America’s persistent realities of disenfranchisement and inequality, Wilson’s powerful artworks produced over a career lasting in excess of six decades continue resonating.
“He believed his imagery validated the humanness of African Americans, not thought to be worthy of beautifully dignified, poignant portrayals,” King Hammond, exhibition co-curator, art historian, and founding director for the Center for Race and Culture at Maryland Institute College of Art, said in an exhibition press release. “Through masterful draughtsmanship skills, an intense attention to detail, and acute observations of the human body, Wilson recorded hundreds of figurative studies while he cared for his family. This exhibition demonstrates his intense love of family, friends, and community—his muses and the catalysts and inspiration that focused all his creative energies.”
The Art Of John Wilson
Wilson’s history with the MFA goes all the way back to 1939 when he enrolled as a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
“Wilson’s talent as an artist was evident from the beginning—the earliest work in the show is War Scene, a drawing from 1940, a powerful meditation on the horrors of World War II, made when Wilson was just 18 years old,” Murphy said. “While still a teenager taking classes at the Roxbury Boys’ Club, he caught the attention of some older students from the Museum School, who advocated for his enrollment there.”
The MFA has the largest collection of Wilson’s art, having acquired its first piece of his in 1946, before the artist turned 25. Streetcar Scene is a lithograph made in 1945, the year after he graduated from the School.
“It depicts a young Black man on his way to work at the Boston Navy Yard, seated in a streetcar surrounded by white passengers,” Murphy explained. “It’s one of several works in which Wilson focused on the connections between economic injustice and racial discrimination, and reflects, in part, the young artist’s own concerns about building a career and supporting a family.”
Having an artwork acquired by the MFA, one of the most prestigious art museums in the world since first opening its doors in 1876, at that young age, as a Black man, with Boston’s checkered history of race relations, is testament to Wilson’s towering talent.
Featuring approximately 110 works in a wide range of media—drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, and illustrated books—“Witnessing Humanity” presents more than 20 new acquisitions on view for the first time and rarely seen loans from the Wilson family, institutions, and private collectors.
Highlights include:
· The sculpture Father and Child Reading (1985) and a series of related drawings, honoring the influence of Wilson's father, whose love of reading and education deeply shaped the artist's life.
· The maquette for Wilson’s bronze bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1985), a commission for the United States Capitol building in Washington D.C., which became the first representation of an African American displayed in the Capitol Rotunda and the first congressional sculptural commission awarded to a Black artist.
· Four life-sized studies for one of Wilson’s most ambitious works, The Young Americans (1972–75), a series of colorful portraits of his children and their friends.
The exhibition centerpiece, however, is a reduced-scale bronze maquette for Eternal Presence, the monumental sculpture installed in 1987 on the grounds of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Roxbury. Fondly called the “Big Head” by locals, the colossal sculpture was described by Wilson as “an image of universal dignity.”
A Boston Artist
After living briefly in Chicago and New York following his time in Mexico City, Wilson returned to Boston in 1964 to accept a position at Boston University. He merged his art with activism, advocating on behalf of Black artists in Boston. He was deeply engaged with the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts in Roxbury and the National Center of Afro-American Artists. In 1966, he helped to establish the Boston Negro Artists’ Association, which served as a resource for connectivity, supporting artists, exhibitions, and research.
Wilson was a Boston guy. Input from a group of local artists, authors, educators, and historians through the Museum’s Table of Voices initiative for embedding community perspectives into exhibitions helped reinforce his local roots and impact throughout.
“The group felt strongly that the space should include photographs of Wilson to allow the visitor to connect not just with the work, but with Wilson as a person,” Murphy said. “We loved that idea and included family photographs of the artist on the text panels that introduce each section of the exhibition. Because the show is arranged in roughly chronological order, you’ll find the twenty-something Wilson smiling out at you from the text panels in the first gallery, through to the man in his seventies posing with the later, monumental sculpture in the final section.”
That monumental sculpture, Eternal Presence, changed lives in Wilson’s hometown.
“One of the Table of Voices members, D. McMillion Williams, really brought home the significance of this Boston landmark for its Black residents.” Murphy remembers. “‘The Big Head is ours,’ they assert. ‘It’s one of the first works of art I saw that looked like me, where my features were magnified and made to look beautiful.’”
Admission to “Witnessing Humanity” is free during the Museum’s annual Memorial Day Open House (May 26) and Juneteenth celebration (June 19).
Wilson’s longtime gallerist and friend Martha Richardson contributed greatly to the exhibition. On February 15, the Martha Richardson Fine Art gallery opens a complementary exhibition, “John Wilson: Self Portraits and Spot Drawings.” The title is adopted from Wilson’s term for the small drawings he created, often on found materials like envelopes.
Following the MFA’s presentation, the exhibition will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where it will be on view from September 20, 2025, through February 8, 2026.
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