Part of becoming a good New Yorker is working to do a better job of availing oneself of more of the cultural riches we fortunate residents might so easily obtain for free or very little. Too often, although trying our best, we fail to make it to see exciting shows that were years in the making.
As I have, have you also missed going to London to see this year’s blockbuster Royal Academy of Art’s once-in-a-lifetime exhibition examining the 50-year career of Chicago painter Kerry James Marshall: The Histories? It is to conclude on January 18, so we have probably all missed our chance.
Fortunately, then, there is still plenty worth experiencing here at home, even beyond the newly opened Studio Museum. Now, at the last minute, two shows are well worth any effort, whatever it takes to hurry off to them.
Nearly over, closing on February 8, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s special exhibition Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson (1922–2015) is the largest presentation of the output of this great painter, sculptor, and graphic artist to date. At a cursory glance, seemingly somber and sorrowful, a closer study of this carefully curated assemblage rewards with representations of the African American experience, which, for all their pathos, are as poetic as they are powerful.
Covering a 60-year career, it features work juxtaposing Nazi atrocity and race-based violence, as rooted in the same evil. Paris and New York rooftops and subways are seen as synonymous. Wilson’s vision is all about humanity’s kinship. The Black parenthood he depicts, the Black despair he portrays, are each aspects of a universal condition, recognizable to all.
Michael Henry Adams photos
2023: With Ms. Ringgold at the Museum of the City of New York. 
1946: The caption explains, “Wilson’s brother William was stationed in Georgia… “subject to all the indignities of Jim Crow….” 
1945: The artist’s sister at her dressing table. This beguiling image was but one of many Wilson made in response to a paucity of positive images in white media during his art student days 
A young man sees today, pictured “yesterday” 
A cubist subway, is it Paris or is it Chicago? 
Dr. King empowered in blooming boughs of his truths 
A swinging work from Ringgold’s Jazz Stories series: Somebody Stole My Broken Heart, Mama Can Sing, Papa Can Blow #2: Come On Dance With Me 
How capably Ringgold commands Western academic classifications like abstract expressionism, without surrendering her inner spirit’s African origins. This picnic scene is as magical, as sublime as, Seurat’s pointillism reverie. 
A mystical mirror of the soul.
Determined to present what he called “a universal humanity,” disturbed by both the derision and omission Blacks suffer in American art, Wilson sought to rectify both our distortion and our erasure.
A more modest Faith Ringgold show downtown at the Jack Shainman Gallery (46 Lafayette Street, Manhattan; 212-645-1701, jackshainman.com), although closing even sooner (January 24), is just as compelling as the marvelous Met offering.
Roughly, Wilson and Ringgold (1930–2024) were contemporaries, so not surprisingly, both artists worked in pursuit of the same justice and dignity that has proved so elusive for people of color. However, where Wilson’s work proves masterful and moving through the use of simple strong imagery, with vibrant, saturated, joyful color and a deceptively naive sensibility, Ringgold disarms the viewer with the enchanting wonderment of fairy tales. This is the spirit that characterizes perhaps her best-known work: mosaic portraits of deified Black heroes, in flight above Harlem, found in the 125th Street IRT subway station.
Before Black History Month, do not delay in finding your way to see both of these elevating displays of Black creative excellence.