Allegories of Modern Alienation
In 1964, the Department of Art at Harpur College, composed until then exclusively of art historians, recruited Wilson to join the faculty as its first practicing artist. He would remain a member of the Binghamton community for almost three decades, helping shape the teaching of fine art on campus until his retirement in 1992. Wilson saw coming North as an end to his isolation in the segregated South, and while he continued to advocate for equal rights for Black Americans, his work began to address increasingly broad themes of modern alienation over the second half of the 1960s.
Sculptures such as the three-part Birmingham Genesis and the Seven Seals of Silence, while certainly informed by his experiences within the civil rights struggle, eschew the explicitly racialized forms of his work of the previous decade. They instead express their more universal subjects through anonymous, generic bodies stripped of clear identifying markers of ethnicity.
These allegories of humanity’s struggle against isolation in a technocratic society, made during his early years in Binghamton, also marked a shift in Wilson's style, from the direct carving of his early work to a growing concentration on modeling in clay or plaster, to be later cast in bronze, whose warmth and durability increasingly appealed to him.
Object Labels:
Birmingham Genesis, 1965-66
bronze Patricia and Craig Wilson ’74, MA ’76 collection, Latham, N.Y.
The three components of this work constitute a narrative of collective growth, from the uncertainty of “Self-hate and Rejection” to the hyperactive jumble of “Action without Direction” and, finally, the cohesive marching group of “Commitment to Life.” While the figures bear no racially distinctive features, the title makes obvious references to the 1963 demonstrations, led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to challenge racial segregation in the titular Alabama city.
For Wilson, these struggles – which met with notoriously violent resistance – promised the birth of a new society. Not long after completing it in 1966, he explained: “This group is not meant as propaganda. I have tried to create something that would reflect the experience of all men. I wanted to express the movement from self-hate to a productive commitment, a movement that is not unique to the Negro but is common to countries, groups and individuals.”
Untitled, n.d.
ink on paper
Julie Wilson Shiver collection, Owings Mills, Md.
What at first glance appears to be a field of calligraphic black marks marching across the page in a staccato rhythm resolves, upon closer looking, into a jumble of bodies. We can make out legs, feet and heads in the confused tangle. This drawing is likely related to sculptures Wilson was pursuing around 1965, including “Self-hate and Rejection,” the first part of Birmingham Genesis, with its battle royal of struggling figures. The sense of gravity evident here, with the bodies seeming to fall through space, prefigures his later Figure Study.
The Invisible, from “Seven Seals of Silence,” 1966
bronze
Binghamton University Art Museum, Binghamton, N.Y., gift of Ann and Arthur Weissman in memory of Adele and David Bernstein 2016.22
In 1966, the Sun-Bulletin newspaper commissioned Wilson to design a memorial monument to President John F. Kennedy, who had been assassinated three years earlier. For this, his first public commission, Wilson designed an 11-foot-tall, triangular granite obelisk that contained seven bronze plaques, the “Seven Seals of Silence.” Each plaque represented an aspect of what he called “the evils of noninvolvement of man in life.”
The Invisible is the sixth of these panels, depicting five figures whose identities have been hollowed out, becoming mere shells or, as Wilson described it, “molds.” The sixth figure, on the far right, arrives and prepares to enter “a new mold of non-existence.” Wilson’s seals were inspired by his reading of 19th-century British historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), who argued that the intellectual forms into which our deepest convictions had been cast were dead and that new ones fit for the times must be found. The complete ensemble can be seen on the monument to Kennedy in Centennial Plaza, at the corner of Chenango and Henry Streets in downtown Binghamton.
Figure Study, 1967
bronze
Binghamton University Art Museum, Binghamton, N.Y., gift of Gil and Deborah Williams 2023.17.15
In many ways, this work summarizes Wilson’s formal and thematic concerns of the later 1960s. It introduces into his sculpture a figural vocabulary of stylized, bonelike forms that would be further developed two years later in Board of Directors. The splayed body expresses the artist’s thoughts on the way a modern, mechanized society has dehumanized its inhabitants. Its sprawling disequilibrium, as the creature’s limbs stretch out into the void, is reminiscent of the first element in Birmingham Genesis. In Figure Study, Wilson united these aspects to create a symbolic statement, a secularized fall of humankind that has succumbed to the brutalizing and alienating forces of technocracy.
In 1970, students at Binghamton’s Off Campus College offered to fund the enlargement of Figure Study into a more monumental work, which Wilson retitled Falling Man. After some uncertainty, it was installed in 1973 atop a concrete column between Bartle Library and what is now the Technology Hub. Lovingly restored in 2019 by Ronald Gonzalez and James Spano, it can now be found outside the Fine Arts Building adjacent to the Peace Quad.
Study on Violence, 1968
bronze
Sondra Farganis collection, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
Three simplified figures in poses of strenuous action attempt to scale or push down a wall that separates them from a lone, seated individual. The absence of a backdrop renders the scene powerfully metaphorical, even universal. Are the straining men assailing their isolated fellow or saving him? Does the “violence” of the title refer to their actions or to the loneliness of the solitary figure?
For Wilson, this work was informed by his reading of “Nothing Personal” (1964), an essay by novelist and playwright James Baldwin (1924–1987), in which he wrote: “The America of my experience has worshiped and nourished violence for as long as I have been on earth. The violence was being perpetrated mainly against black men, though [...]; and so it didn't count. But, if a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe. The forces thus released in the people can never be held in check, but run their devouring course, destroying the very foundations which it was imagined they would save.”
Board of Directors, 1969
bronze and chrome-plated steel
Binghamton University Art Museum, Binghamton, N.Y., gift of Patricia and Craig Wilson ’74, MA ’76 to Binghamton University, transferred to the Binghamton University Art Museum 2023.16
Beginning in the early 1960s, Wilson began to imagine the human body reduced to bonelike, skeletal forms. First seen in works on paper, these forms appear in Board of Directors, a group of ten dehumanized figures in bronze conspiring around a chrome table that reflects them from every angle. Art historian Nkiru Nzegwu dates this work’s conception to the summer of 1968 when, following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Wilson lived for a season in Harlem. Observing the sharp racial and class divides of the city, he devised a work that indicted – in a way both cutting and humorous – the plotting of the powerful against those they seek to exploit.
In the spring of 1971, Wilson lent this work to a group exhibition organized by the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in New York as a protest against the Whitney Museum of American Art’s refusal to appoint a Black curator or consult with Black art historians for a show of contemporary African American art.
Untitled, n.d.
ink and ink wash on paper
Patricia and Craig Wilson ’74, MA ’76 collection, Latham, N.Y.
Although undated, this drawing was included in Wilson’s 1966 exhibition at the Champlain Hall Gallery, Harpur College and likely dates from the mid-1960s, following his arrival at Binghamton – a period marked by a new experimentation in style and content. Here he explores an abstract, biomorphic vocabulary seldom seen in his three-dimensional work. The form is vaguely architectural, with arches supporting a dome pierced by truncated spheroids, but their ominous black openings give the structure an uncanny resonance that suggests anything but serene shelter.
Blue Notes, ca. 1969 (?)
bronze and chrome-plated steel
Patricia and Craig Wilson ’74, MA ’76 collection, Latham, N.Y.
For Wilson, jazz epitomized the ideal art form in the way that it sought out, as he wrote in 1968, “the universal in the specific experience [...] the specific Negro experience transcended into universally understood terms.” When he decided to experiment with expressing a jazz theme in his sculpture, he turned to these abstract, polished bronze columnar forms whose patterns can perhaps be understood to echo the improvisatory yet structured compositions of Charlie Parker (1920–1955) or Miles Davis (1926–1991), two musicians whose recordings were frequently found on the artist’s turntable.
Wilson rarely ventured so far into an abstract vocabulary, but Blue Notes – whose title recalls both one of the greatest jazz record labels and a note played at a slightly different pitch than standard – shows a confidence born of a lifetime’s careful study of the history of his medium. His use of bronze, polished to a machinelike perfection, evokes both modernist sculpture and the instruments that made Parker and Davis famous.