In his life and his work, African American artist John Wilson defied the oppression that limited freedom and opportunities to people of his race.
In 1950, Wilson moved to Mexico with his white wife, Julie, where they could live openly in a way they could not in the United States. He studied art among the community of expatriate African American artists. In 1952, Wilson created a piece that could never have been created in his home country: a mural depicting the horrifying aftermath of a black man’s lynching by the Ku Klux Klan.
That artwork, titled “The Incident,” no longer exists. It was painted over, as all student murals were, to create a blank canvas for the next mural. But Wilson created numerous preparatory sketches and paintings leading up to the creation of the mural. Yale University Art Gallery is presenting an exhibit of those studies, as well as a life-size black-and-white reproduction of the mural, created by Yale for this exhibit.
“We felt this is a very timely exhibit, with what is happening in the country right now and with the recent opening of The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery,” says Lisa Hodermarsky, the museum’s curator of prints and drawings.
“There have been more than 4,400 documented victims of racial terror from 1877 to 1950. Lynchings went on the decline as mass incarcerations went on the rise, the number of people put on Death Row without a truly fair trial,” Hodermarsky says.
“As Bryan Stevenson, who wrote ‘Just Mercy,’ said, ‘The death penalty is lynching’s stepchild.’ And lynching is slavery’s stepchild.”
The mural shows four hooded Klansman cutting a dead man from the tree on which he was lynched, as a cross burns in the background. The hanged man shows signs of torture: his feet hang at odd angles, and one is grossly swollen. One of the Klansmen holds a whip.
Watching “The Incident” from inside a house next to the scene of the atrocity, a furious black man clutches a rifle, as a terrified woman sits next to him, tightly hugging a naked baby.
Most of the studies focus on hands and feet, and the mural is noteworthy for its depiction of hands. Klansmen hold a rope, a whip, a rifle that he probably will use or has used. The man in the house holds a rifle, which he probably will never use, or he would be lynched himself. The woman holds the baby. The baby’s hands hang loosely, oblivious to the barbarity taking place just outside the window.
Wilson was born in 1922 and raised in the Boston area. His father was an acolyte of black nationalist Marcus Garvey and Wilson grew up reading black-owned newspapers that often reported lynchings, some with photos of the incidents.
The mural “was a way to work through the trauma of reading those articles and seeing those photos,” says Hodermarsky.
Wilson studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Tufts University before traveling to Paris to study under Fernand Leger. Inspired by the politically charged murals of Jose Clemente Orozco, Wilson then moved to Mexico City, where he lived for six years, studying and creating art.
He returned to the United States in 1956, despite the fact that he and his wife had to drive in separate cars while traveling through the deep South, and later moved back to Boston, where he made art and taught for the rest of his life. He died in 2015.
The exhibit is located in the fourth-floor mezzanine exhibit space because of its remoteness.
“It is the one gallery you can’t just happen upon without the elevator or the stairs,” Hodermarsky says. “We wanted to give people fair warning about what they are going to see, to give them a head’s up.”
At both entrances to the gallery, warning labels are mounted. Visitors should take those labels seriously, because once they see the mural, they’ll never be able to unsee it.
The exhibit also includes a small library of books about lynching, racial terror and expat American artists, as well as a nook where visitors can draw or write what they are feeling.
RECKONING WITH “THE INCIDENT”: JOHN WILSON’S STUDIES FOR A LYNCHING MURAL is at Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St. in New Haven, until May 10. “Art and Social Justice: An Evening with the Greater New Haven NAACP” is Feb. 12 from 5 to 7 p.m. A panel discussion, “The Legacy of Lynching: Artistic Confrontations of Racial Terror,” with Ken Gonzales-Day, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Crystal Feimster, Jennifer Taylor and David W. Blight, is Feb. 20 at 5 p.m. artgallery.yale.edu.
Susan Dunne can be reached at sdunne@courant.com.
