To be Black in America, artist John Woodrow Wilson (1922–2015) once said, was to endure “a kind of slow death.” How best to fight that protracted, demoralizing violence? For Wilson, one solution was to produce art.In his paintings, sculptures, and prints, he often tackled oppression head-on. Early in his career, he created wrenching images of racist violence, workers’ rights movements, and a dissatisfaction that he portrayed as being unique to his community. One memorable painting, from 1945, features a Black man hunched over a desk, his hands around his head; it’s titled Black Despair.But by the end of his career, he had transitioned to a much different, and seemingly much gentler mode. He repeatedly drew people he knew in Boston, where he was born, and where he spent a good portion of his career. For Washington, D.C., he created a particularly memorable work of public art, the first memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. to grace the Capitol building.“Over the course of six decades, from his very earliest work that he was doing in school, he was fighting for authentic and positive representations of Black Americans, and his approach was to elevate his subjects, whether they were family or friends, people within his community or iconic public figures,” said Edward Saywell, the director of exhibitions strategy and gallery displays at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. “So much of his work is about the visibility of Black experience demanding to be seen.”Saywell is one of three curators behind a Wilson retrospective that opened earlier this month at the MFA Boston. Within Boston, Wilson is something of a local legend. But beyond that city, his fame is less certain. That’s why, when the show travels this fall to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, its co-organizing institution, it could cement Wilson within a canon that has historically excluded him. “We feel deeply and passionately that he does need to be seen on a national platform,” Saywell said.It’s not as though Wilson didn’t achieve success in his day. He was friends with sculptor Elizabeth Catlett, who was godmother to his child. He was close with Robert Blackburn, a well-known New York printmaker who worked with Catlett, Romare Bearden, and many other Black artists of note, and who later served as best man at Wilson’s wedding. He won top honors at the Atlanta University Art Annual, once considered the most important recurring exhibition for Black art in the US; artist Charles White was on the jury that picked Wilson. His work was acquired early on by institutions such as the Met and the Museum of Modern Art.John Wilson, The Young Americans: Gabrielle, 1975.There have been many surveys of Black modernism since Wilson’s passing, but by and large, they haven’t featured any of his works. Saywell and his cocurators, art historian Leslie King-Hammond and Met prints and drawings curator Jennifer Farrell, offered some potential reasons: Wilson worked in figuration, not abstraction; he was frequently based outside New York, the national art capital of his day; he held day jobs as an art teacher, both in and outside academic settings, in order to support himself and his family, which often kept him from his studio.King-Hammond suggested yet another factor: his focus on people, and not formalist ideas, was unfashionable in the eyes of art history’s shapers. “He was very clear about not compromising the messages that he sought to create, which were about his fascination with anatomy, with the human body—with how every time you saw an individual, you saw something new, different, or amazing,” she said. “He wanted to legitimize that, to preserve it, to give it honor, to bless it with the right stroke, the right gesture.”John Wilson, Roz No. 9, Study for Eternal Presence, 1972.We are familiar with many artists throughout history who’ve done something similar. “You know, when Rodin did it, we didn’t have any problem with it,” King-Hammond continued. “When Leonardo did it, we didn’t have any problem with it. And here’s John Wilson in the middle of Boston,” working with what she described as “the energy and the foresight to continue when he was facing relentless pushback.”Wilson was born in Roxbury, a neighborhood in Boston with a sizable Black population, to two immigrants from what was then known as British Guiana. Encouraged by his father to take up art, Wilson enrolled in courses at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, where his teachers were all white. Walking through the museum galleries, he was struck by what he saw: image after image of white people. “The implication,” Wilson once said, “was that black people were not capable of being beautiful and true and precious . . . that black people and their special experience were irrelevant and unimportant.”He would dedicate a career to remedying this. And he would do so, first, by relying on the language of social realism to critique the issues afflicting his community. Black Soldier (1943), a painting in the MFA show, features a Black family split apart by World War II. The father has literally turned his back on his wife and child as he faces the Statue of Liberty, a symbol of his patriotic duty. Both husband and wife stare at us, longing for something better.John Wilson, Black Soldier, 1943.Then, by the end of the ’40s, he would briefly try his hand at something very different, abstraction. He graduated from Tufts University with a degree in education in 1947 and received a grant to travel to Paris; there, he trained under Fernand Léger, a French modernist known for his so-called tubist style, in which people appear to be formed from machinelike elements. Wilson began working in a manner similar to Léger’s, painting assemblages of unevenly shaped blue and red swatches. But Wilson’s abstractions are overly fussy; they don’t feel effortless in the same way as his social realist works.That may explain why, when Wilson obtained a grant to visit Mexico City in 1950, the same year he married Julie Kowitch, he returned to realism, crafting prints that did not shy away from the harsh conditions of labor. He studied at the Taller de Gráfica Popular, and his work began to take on flourishes derived from modernists like Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. These new figurative works were just as blindingly direct as before. His horrifying 1952 mural The Incident, a study for which appears in the MFA show, depicts a Black family shielding themselves in their home while a Black man is lynched by Klansmen outside.John Wilson, Campesinos (Peasants), 1953.Farrell, the Met curator who co-organized the current Wilson retrospective, said these works, though a return to figuration, are different from his work of the early 1940s. “He felt really a strong responsibility to provide positive representations. That, I think, would be the reason why he did not go that purely abstract route,” she explained. “But what’s interesting is, looking at the works he made with Léger and then later in Mexico, they have very strong abstract elements, patterns of positive and negative and breaking things down into pure geometric forms. They’re still there.”Wilson returned to the US in 1956, taking up residence in New York before moving back to Boston in 1964. That same year, he started teaching art at Boston University, where he stayed through 1986. He could never forget the realities of being Black in the US: His wife was white, and they had to ride mass transit separately. But his art softened as he sought new ways to provide Black sitters with the dignity they had been denied by the mainstream media.John Wilson, Self-Portrait, 1943.Between the mid-’60s and the mid-’80s—a period that roughly aligns with his BU years—his output included the cover for a kids’ book on Malcolm X and many drawings of his children, their friends, and people within their community. The drawings are rich with closely observed details: flared jeans that catch on sneakers, voluminous hairstyles, tightly knotted turbans. “You see him working through the challenges of capturing the moment, the gesture, the character, the annoyances that come with individuals,” King-Hammond said. “You wonder: how many days did he work with this particular subject, and how many times did he try to reassess how to present or portray this individual?” He was fascinated by adolescents, she said, because he viewed them as “future leaders.”John Wilson, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1985.Now, with a new generation of Black figurative painters having gained recognition for their work, Wilson’s art is having its day. The current retrospective was in some ways a coincidence: Farrell discovered when she proposed the exhibition that the MFA was already plotting a similar Wilson show, and thus was born a collaborative presentation. It was a happy accident, she said, one that she described as being fortuitous because contemporary artists are making work in dialogue with his art, whether they know it or not. “I think a lot of artists draw from Wilson or are engaging issues that Wilson touched on in the ’40s,” she said.The exhibition catalog features meditations on Wilson’s art by the likes of Amy Sherald, Napoleon Jones-Henderson, and Derrick Adams. In his account, Adams writes that Wilson “is a reference point for my understanding of what to expect and not expect from America as a Black person, all while staying on mission for the culture we represent fully.” Wilson’s contributions to art history were very nearly erased in institutions like the MFA and the Met, rendering his work invisible to most. Wilson, an artist who feared “slow death,” has now officially found a second life.