Copyright Tom Herde

Illustrator, printmaker, and sculptor John Woodrow Wilson was 92 when he died in January 2015. He pursued the path of an artist, “since he was a boy on Roxbury’s streets, learning to sketch and honing a burgeoning talent that eventually would place his paintings and sculptures in the Museum of Fine Arts and far beyond,” wrote Bryan Marquand for the Boston Globe. “In the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., stands a 3-foot-tall bronze bust of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that is surely the most viewed creation of John Wilson, an artist who grew up in Roxbury and painted, sculpted, and made prints out of his home studio in Brookline for decades. Like much of his most important work, the bust brings viewers to the intersection of art and politics, of pure creativity and the desire to examine social injustice.”

Princeton University Library holds two of his illustrated books: Joan M. Lexau, Striped Ice Cream; illustrations by John Wilson (Philadelphia; New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, c1968). Cotsen Children’s Library (CTSN) Eng 20 61725 and Arnold Adoff, Malcolm X; illustrated by John Wilson (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, c1970). Cotsen Children’s Library (CTSN) Eng 20 33357.

In addition, the Princeton University Art Museum has a drawing for the cover design of “The Reporter,” July 23, 1959, entitled Steel Worker (pastel and gouache on cream wove paper. Museum purchase Kathleen Compton Sherrerd Fund for Acquisitions in American Art 2005-16).

For more information on the American artist, listen to his oral history interview made March 11, 1993 to Aug. 16, 1994 under the auspice of the Archives of American Art. 11 sound cassettes (16 hrs, 30 min.). Transcript: 497 p. Abstract: “Wilson discusses his childhood as a member of a family of middle class blacks from British Guiana (now Guyana); his father’s grave disappointments in the face of racial discrimination; his parents’ push for their children to succeed; early urge to read and draw; encouragement by School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston students who taught at the Roxbury Boys Club; his secondary education; and friends. …His first teaching position at the MFA School; his involvement in civil rights in Boston; his gregariousness and the use of his studio as a meeting place for artists and political activists; his involvement with socialism in Boston and New York; and working in a socialist children’s camp.…his move toward sculpture, beginning in the early 1960s, as a medium most expressive of black persons, culminating in the 1980s in a series of colossal heads and a statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. for the U.S. Capitol (1985-86).”

A memorial for the artist is being held today at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

If you are a lover of British caricature, consider joining your friends in Oxford for James Gillray@200: Caricaturist without a Conscience? on March 28 and 29, 2015, organised by Todd Porterfield, Université de Montréal; Martin Myrone, Tate Britain; and Michael Burden, New College, Oxford; with Ersy Contogouris, Université de Montréal

The two-day symposium is being held to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Gillray’s death, and in conjunction with the Ashmolean Museum’s exhibition, Love Bites: Caricatures of James Gillray, based on New College’s outstanding collection.

The conference website states: “James Gillray’s reputation in the two centuries since his death has been as varied and layered as his prints. Trained at the Royal Academy, he failed at reproductive printmaking, yet became, according to the late-eighteenth-century Weimar journal London und Paris, one of the greatest European artists of the era. Napoleon, from his exile on St Helena, allegedly remarked that Gillray’s prints did more to run him out of power than all the armies of Europe.

In England, patriots had hired him to propagandize against the French and touted him as a great national voice, but he was an unreliable gun-for-hire. At a large public banquet, during the heat of anti-Revolutionary war fever, he even raised a toast to his fellow artist, the regicide, Jacques-Louis David. Gillray produced a highly individual, highly schooled, and often outlandish body of work with no clear moral compass that undermines the legend of the caricaturist as the voice and heart of the people.”

Saturday March 28
I: Gillray in the Media Age
10.30 Douglas Fordham, University of Virginia
‘A Media Critic for the Intaglio Age’
11.00 Esther Chadwick, Yale University
‘Gillray’s Tree of Liberty: political communication and epistolary networks in the radical 1790s’
11.30 Kate Grandjouan, Visiting Associate Professor, Department of Art History,
University of Belgrade
‘Gillray’s French jokes: the “sick-list” casualties of the 1790s’

12.00 Lunch
II: Gillray in the Colonial Networks: Positionings on Race and Slavery
1.00 Julie Mellby, Graphic Arts Curator within Rare Books and Special Collections at Firestone Library, Princeton University
‘The Sale and Resale of English Beauties in the East Indies’
1.30 Amanda Lahikainen, Aquinas College
‘James Gillray and Representations of Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign:
Islam as Republican Sacrilege’
2.00 Katherine Hart, Senior Curator of Collections & the Barbara C. and Harvey P. Hood
1918 Curator of Academic Programming, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth
College
‘James Gillray, Charles James Fox, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade: Caricature and Displacement in the Debate over Reform’
2.30 Coffee
III: The Artist and Formal Means
3.00 Ersy Contogouris, Université de Québec à Montreal
‘Gillray’s Preparatory Drawings’
3.30 Cynthia Roman, The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University
‘James Gillray and the Satiric Alternative to Painting History’

Sunday March 29
IV: The Artist and Literary Means
10.15 David Taylor, Assistant Professor, Dept. of English and Comparative Literary
Studies, University of Warwick
‘Gillray, Milton, and the “Caricatura Sublime”’
10.45 Rachel M. Brownstein, Professor of English, City University of New York
‘James Gillray and Jane Austen: Aesthetic Affinities’
11.15 Coffee
V: Gillray, the People, the Academy and Revolution
11.45 Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, Associate Lecturer, Department of History of Art, Birkbeck College, University of London
‘Caricature’s unconscious: James Gillray and the Academy’
12.15 Ian Haywood, Professor of English Co-Director, Centre for Research in Romanticism
University of Roehampton, London
‘Gillray’s valediction: The Life of William Cobbett’