Black Monuments
Wilson had already begun to conceive of an art with a public vocation in the mid-1960s with his Kennedy Memorial project. By the early 1970s, he was turning much of his attention to designing public sculptures that addressed the history and culture of Black American experience, inaugurating what would arguably be the most productive decade of his career.
The measurable gains made by the civil rights movement over the previous decade meant that public funding was now available to embellish educational institutions in predominantly Black neighborhoods. In a series of artworks commissioned by libraries and schools in the Midwest and along the East Coast, Wilson embraced a commemorative endeavor. Abandoning the somewhat abstruse quality of his modern allegories, he returned to the traditional human figure, ennobling Black subjects in a monumental form they had historically been denied and creating works meant to celebrate and teach their Black audiences about a shared history of struggle and triumph.
The decade of the 1970s also saw Wilson involved in several major exhibitions of African American art, including the groundbreaking survey “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” held during the bicentennial year of 1976 – a high point of his recognition by the wider community of American art.
Object Labels:
Study for Ralph Ellison, 1974-75
plaster
English Department, Binghamton University, Binghamton, N.Y.
In early 1974, Wilson was commissioned to create a portrait of Ralph Ellison (1914–1994), author of Invisible Man (1952), for the new Ralph Ellison Library in a predominantly African American neighborhood of Oklahoma City, Ellison’s birthplace. The resulting work featured two depictions of the author, including the one found on this large circular relief picturing him in profile, seated outdoors – what Wilson described as “Ellison the man of the world.”
Along with other Black writers like Richard Wright (1908–1960) and James Baldwin, Ellison had been crucial reading for Wilson in the 1950s and early 1960s. They helped to heal what he called the “psychic split” caused by living in the Jim Crow South, where law and custom denied Black humanity. “The writers Ellison and Baldwin were instrumental in pulling me up from the depths by the power of their work,” he later wrote and, in this work, he paid fitting homage to his literary hero.
Jazz Musicians, 1982-84
bronze
Jesse Kalfel ’71, MS ’76 collection, West Newbury, Mass.
The jazz musician, Wilson believed, was “the most creative person in Black America,” the most effective interpreter of Black experience into the language of art. In Jazz Musicians, he translated the experience of making this music into sculpture. It pictures a five-man combo in mid-performance, capturing them in dynamic motion. Wilson defied the static nature of his medium, multiplying his figures’ profiles as they swing. The work embodies what art historian Richard J. Powell has called “the blues aesthetic,” an embrace of the musical heritage of Black America which demands a recognition of artistic excellence and universal human values so often denied to Black artists.
Jazz Musicians was originally commissioned as a large bronze frieze for the Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore – from which Wilson himself had graduated in 1943. He occasionally made smaller-scale versions of his public projects, as here, for friends and colleagues.
Maquette for Jazz Musicians, ca. 1982
plaster
Joel Murray ’83 collection, Davenport, N.Y.
Frederick Douglass, 1978-79
plaster
Albany Institute of History & Art, Albany, N.Y., gift of Craig and Julie Wilson
In fall 1978, Wilson was approached by the National Park Service about submitting a proposal for a monument to the abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1818?–1895) intended for Harpers Ferry, W. Va. In response Wilson created this model in plaster, although the project in the end never saw the light of day.
Standing about half life-size, it shows Douglass – with his beard and hair swept back off his forehead – in mid-oration, his left hand resting on his hip as he clenches his right into a fist, an immediately recognizable symbol of the struggle against oppression. Wilson’s sculpture, no less than Douglass’s discourse, was a stand against the invisibility imposed upon Black people. For Wilson, the Black monument was intended as a more inclusive sort of collective mirror, one in which he, and his public, might come to recognize themselves.
Medgar Wiley Evers: The Man, 1989-90
bronze
Collection of Charles Evans Inniss Memorial Library, Medgar Evers College, City University of New York, N.Y.
Wilson’s national reputation was buoyed by a broader interest, felt in the wake of the civil rights movement, in redressing the discrimination Black artists had faced throughout the 20th century. Although fewer of the public commissions in which he specialized came to pass after the mid-1980s, Wilson continued to honor the history of the civil rights movement with portrait busts of prominent activists, such as this one of Medgar Evers (1925–1963).
Evers, who served as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s first field secretary in Mississippi, was murdered in 1963 by a segregationist in a notorious killing that received national attention. In 1970, the City University of New York named its newest senior college, located in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, after this martyred civil rights leader; two decades later, it honored him with this portrait.