At eight feet tall, John Wilson’s bronze bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. was intended to be “a Black image you could not ignore.” Much smaller, but still arresting, Wilson’s sculpture of King with an intensely focused gaze (a model for the final piece installed in Martin Luther King Jr. Park in Buffalo) dominates the first gallery of the artist’s powerful Metropolitan Museum of Art retrospective. Intimate charcoal drawings of the love between fathers and children, stylized portrayals of working people in Mexico and Paris, pictured incidents of racially motivated violence and art made in wartime show Wilson countering prevalent negative images of African Americans with depictions grounded in real-life that demonstrate beauty and respect for Black subjects. (On view on the Upper East Side at the Met Museum through Feb 8th, 2026).
