September 18 – November 1, 2025

Mary Ryan Gallery is pleased to announce Focus on John Wilson: Sculptures and Drawings, comprising three bronze sculptures (including his monumental Martin Luther King, Jr. sculpture) and four charcoal drawings. This focus exhibition takes place concurrently with the solo exhibition John Wilson: Witnessing Humanity, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and co-organized with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with accompanying exhibition catalog. John Wilson: Witnessing Humanity was curated by Leslie King Hammond, Patrick Murphy, Edward Saywell, and Jennifer Farrell. Mary Ryan Gallery proudly held a solo exhibition of Wilson’s work in 2006, and also included his work in the 1997 group exhibition Civil Progress: Images of Black America (catalog essay by Halima Taha). 

The Boston Globe wrote in their review, “In his rough gestural swipes of charcoal and oil stick, charged with dynamic fury, you can feel him in the room with you, spectral, urgent, defiant. I don’t hesitate to call the show a landmark; it pays respect, definitively, to an underacknowledged master of his form, and to his irrepressible devotion to justice.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. was an important figure for Wilson and the subject of two of his major public commissions: one on permanent display in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol Building, Washington, DC, and the other, an 8-foot tall commission in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Park (1982) in Buffalo, New York for which this maquette (or model) was created. Wilson was selected during national competitions to create both portraits. Coretta Scott King, who served on the advisory committee for the Capitol Building commission, said that Wilson’s design was chosen because it captured the striking qualities of her late husband’s character and physical expression.

Wilson said that his intent was not to execute “a photographic likeness, but rather a universal significance. I wanted people to be moved by the sense of this man’s connection to humanity.” The work references Buddhist, Olmec, and Easter Island colossal heads, as well as the bold, graphic compositions of Mexican muralists. The bronze cast is accompanied here by a charcoal study.

John Wilson (b. 1922, Boston, MA – d. 2015, Brookline, MA) was a sculptor, painter, and printmaker, best known for his powerful portraits of Black men, with a distinct interest in both politically and socially conscious art. He joined other prominent Black artists who lived and trained in Mexico, such as Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White. Born out of socially conscious American graphic art and Mexican muralist art, Wilson experimented with sculptural figuration and bold abstraction in his practice.

Wilson has been included in solo and group exhibitions at Yale University Art Gallery (2020); Clark Atlanta University Art Museum (2019); David C. Driskell Center, University of Maryland (2019); Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College (2019); Philadelphia Museum of Art (2015); Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (2014); Yale University Art Gallery (2011); Amon Carter Museum of Art (2009); and the University of Arizona Museum of Art (2005).

Wilson’s work is in numerous prominent museum collections, including the Cleveland Art Museum, OH; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Washington D.C.; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, Washington D.C.; National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, MA; Smith College Museum of Art, MA; Tufts University Art Galleries, MA; University of Arizona Museum of Art, AZ and the University of Wisconsin’s collection, WI.