2025

John Wilson: Visions of a Printmaker

October 22, 2025 · 12:00 – 1:00 PM ET · Online

Presented by Print Council of America

A lithograph of passengers sitting along the inside of a streetcar, a man in a cap at the centre with women and children on either side and a city street visible through the windows behind.

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Speakers

  • Jennifer Farrell — Jordan Schnitzer Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • Leslie King Hammond — Founding Director, Center for Race and Culture and Professor Emerita, Maryland Institute College of Art

Printmaking played a central role in the oeuvre of John Wilson. He experimented with a variety of techniques over the course of a career spanning more than six decades. As a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, he created powerful prints focused on his Roxbury neighborhood, racial and economic injustice, labor, and fascism. He continued to experiment with printmaking and pursue these themes in Paris (where he studied with Fernand Léger), Mexico City (where he worked at the celebrated TGP, Taller de Gráfica Popular) and then at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop among other studios. Several decades later, he made his celebrated intaglio prints "Martin Luther King Jr." and "The Richard Wright Suite". This talk will focus on prints featured in the exhibition "Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson", organized by The Met Museum and the MFA Boston and on view at The Met Museum through February 8th.