If you live in or around Boston, you may be familiar with the work of John Wilson without knowing who made it. The city is home to two of Wilson’s monumental public sculptures, both located within a short distance from the MFA. A third sculpture, a bust of Martin Luther King Jr., is seen by thousands of visitors every day in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol.

The neighborhood where John Wilson was born is just south of the MFA, not far from the corner of Tremont Street and Ruggles Street. Oakburn Avenue, where he grew up, has been lost to urban renewal, but was near the corner of Ruggles and Sojourner Truth Court (the area is now dominated by the athletic field at Madison Park High School). Wilson’s home in Roxbury was less than a 20-minute walk from the MFA. During his tenure as a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA), he had a studio on Huntington Avenue, directly across from the Museum. The public sculptures Wilson created toward the end of his career in the 1980s and ’90s—Father and Child Reading at Roxbury Community College and Eternal Presence at Roxbury’s National Center of Afro-American Artists (NCAAA)—are also within a 10-minute drive from the MFA and his childhood home.

If you want to explore more of the artist’s work after seeing “Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson,” here are some highlights—both local and distant, but all worth traveling to see.

In Boston

Father and Child Reading, 1990

Roxbury Community College

Wilson described reading with his father as one of the most intimate and important activities they shared, whether it was the Sunday morning comics, or Black newspapers like the New York Amsterdam News, which provided an early education on the politics of Black life in America. This bond is reflected in a series of works, on paper and in sculpture, in which Wilson explored the subject of a father and child reading together, culminating in the over-life-sized bronze sculpture Father and Child Reading, unveiled in 1990 on the campus of Roxbury Community College.

In the words of NCAAA director and longtime Wilson advocate Barry Gaither, the sculpture “embodies the values of teaching and sharing. It’s a man who encircles a standing adolescent boy, as both of them look at a book that the father holds. What it says is, ‘I, as your father, shelter you for this moment, but I want you to go forth in the world for which I present the book. The book is your introduction to everything else beyond.’”

This focus on family, in particular the subject of father and child, is one of the most singular aspects of Wilson’s career. Although it is common to encounter the subject of motherhood in art (history is replete with the image of the Madonna and Child), tender images of a father and child are vanishingly rare.

Eternal Presence, 1987

Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists

South from Roxbury Community College—a 10-minute drive or 25-minute walk—we find Wilson’s most enduring legacy, his monumental sculpture Eternal Presence, lovingly known throughout the Roxbury neighborhood as the “Big Head.” Commissioned in 1982 and unveiled in 1987, it stands on the grounds of the NCAAA. Wilson said of the work, “It is a Black image, but I want it to have a kind of presence and life force that will suggest a universal humanity that all people can identify with.”

Though the head is meant to be androgynous, its features are modeled on those of a woman named Roz Springer. Wilson described Springer—a friend of his eldest daughter and frequent model—as “like living sculpture.” You can find a number of studies of Roz and other preparatory drawings for Eternal Presence in “Witnessing Humanity.”

In arriving at the format of a monumental head, Wilson was inspired by the gravity of Buddhist sculpture he knew from the MFA’s collection, and by the commanding presence of the Olmec heads of ancient Central America, giant stone carvings that rose directly out of the ground. The texture of the hair also has an interesting derivation—it is based on casts of a naturally occurring stone found in Roxbury, called Roxbury puddingstone.

NCAAA director Barry Gaither describes the genesis of the project: “In the early 1970s John and I first talked about his idea to do a monumental head. His essential concept was that it would be installed in the community of his birth and that it would be inspirational and elevate ordinary Black people. He felt that the true purpose of art was to empower people, to give them an ability to see themselves differently.”

D. McMillion Williams—a member of the MFA’s Table of Voices community advisory group—emphasizes the significance of this Boston landmark for its Black residents: “The Big Head is ours,” they assert. “It is one of the first pieces of art that I’ve ever seen that looked like me, where my features were magnified, where my features were made to be beautiful.” In Wilson’s Eternal Presence, Williams says, “We had something in our community that showed us that we were beautiful.”

You can visit this public sculpture anytime, but the work—and its impact in the community—really comes alive once a year, on the first Saturday after the Fourth of July, when the NCAAA hosts a community event they call “Putting Your Touch on Greatness.” It’s an opportunity to participate in the annual cleaning and rewaxing of the sculpture, meant to provide the neighborhood with a personal connection to the work.

Nearby

Maquette for Martin Luther King Jr., 1982

Brookline Town Hall

Wilson was born and raised in Roxbury, but he spent his later years as a resident of Brookline. After graduating from the SMFA in 1944, followed by extended stays in Paris and Mexico City and brief periods in Chicago and New York, Wilson returned to the Boston area in 1964 and purchased a home in Brookline, where he remained for the rest of his life. He would spend the next two decades as a professor of drawing at Boston University, retiring in 1986.

Two years after his death, in the spring of 2017, a group of Brookline citizens formed the Committee to Commemorate John Wilson, to raise awareness of the artist’s achievements. The group raised funds from more than 300 individual donors to acquire a cast of Wilson’s reduced-scale model for a sculpture of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It has since been installed in the town’s seat of government—just a few blocks from Wilson’s Brookline home.

Farther Afield

Martin Luther King Jr., 1983

Martin Luther King Jr. Park, Buffalo, New York

Wilson’s bronze maquette of MLK in the Brookline Town Hall is a study for the full-scale monument commissioned in 1982 for a park in Buffalo, New York. That space, renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Park in 1977, was designed in the 19th century by Frederick Law Olmstead, the same landscape architect who created New York’s Central Park and Boston’s Emerald Necklace. At eight feet tall, the bronze head evokes Wilson’s early ambition to create “a Black image you could not ignore.” Wilson also designed the surrounding environment, including the stone wall that serves as a base for the sculpture.

Martin Luther King Jr., 1986

Capitol Rotunda, Washington, DC

Certainly, the work of art by Wilson with the widest public exposure is his bronze bust of MLK—his second public monument to the slain civil rights leader—which now graces the central Rotunda of the Capitol Building in Washington, DC.

Wilson won the commission for this sculpture in 1985, through a nationwide competition organized by the National Endowment for the Arts. NCAAA director Barry Gaither chaired the panel that awarded the commission. Coretta Scott King was an advisor in the selection process.

Before arriving to deliver his bust, wrapped in blankets in the back of his Mazda, Wilson had never been to the US Capitol himself. Speaking of the imposing government building, he told the Boston Globe, “It alienated me. I never felt part of it. But when I delivered the sculpture, that changed. I felt, a piece of me is in that building.” Today, millions of visitors from around the world pass by Wilson’s bust as they visit the Capitol.

When it was unveiled on January 16, 1986, Wilson’s memorial to MLK was the first sculpture honoring an African American—and the first by a Black artist—to be displayed at the Capitol. You can see a half-scale model for the final sculpture, along with a hauntingly beautiful preparatory drawing, on display in “Witnessing Humanity.”