Introduction

Edward Nathaniel Wilson, Jr. (1925–1996) was a pioneering African American sculptor and civil rights activist. Born into a prominent middle-class Black family in Baltimore, he was shaped by the searing experience of racism while serving his country during the Second World War. After being discharged in 1946, Wilson earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in art from the University of Iowa – a notably progressive institution – and joined the faculty of North Carolina College, a historically Black institution, in 1951. There he developed a national reputation as a sculptor and participated in the burgeoning civil rights movement.

In 1964, he joined the faculty at Binghamton, then known as Harpur College, becoming its first studio artist and one of its first African American professors. Over the following twenty-eight years, Wilson taught generations of students, became an important voice both on campus and in the local community for racial equity and built a practice of public sculpture that frequently took up themes of Black history and culture.

The present exhibition is the first retrospective of this under-recognized artist in over fifty years. It tells a story of struggle and success in the face of indifference and sometimes hostility on the part of a predominantly white cultural elite. Toward the end of his life, Wilson considered the challenges he had faced, writing that “fortunately, social invisibility (and all that that means) does not cripple the mind, the spirit and expression” of those who refuse to be defined by the limiting terms and stereotypes of a racist society. Instead, by claiming full humanity, he became an artist “who visualizes and brings alive the silent memory of all those African and African Americans gone.” The Binghamton University Art Museum is proud to tell the story of this hard-won triumph over invisibility and to honor Ed Wilson, sculptor, African American and humanist.