Provenance: Ex-collection Bob Blackburn, New York; private New York collection.
John Wilson grew up in Roxbury, MA, and showed his substantial artistic talents early, when he was admitted as one of only three black students to the Boston Museum High School at the Museum of Fine Arts. While working on his bachelor's degree at Tufts University, he applied to study with Mexican muralists whose work he had seen exhibited in the Fogg Museum. But as only available scholarships to Paris were avialable at the time, he was able to study with Fernand Léger for a year in Paris. In 1950 Wilson finally received a John Hay Whitney scholarship to Mexico, and like Charles White and Elizabeth Catlett before him, he enrolled in the La Esmeralda School in Mexico City. Wilson's works are found in many museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, and the Clark Atlanta University Collection of African-American Art.
