1952

Campesinos (Peasants)

American, 1922 - 2015

African American artist John Woodrow Wilson was inspired by the work of Mexican modernists after seeing a 1942 group exhibition at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum. He realized his dream of seeing the public murals of José Clemente Orozco (1883 - 1949), David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896 - 1974), and Diego Rivera (1886 - 1957) firsthand eight years later, when a John Hay Whitney Fellowship funded a trip to Mexico—where he would live for the next five years. Campesinos depicts a peasant family sitting on a third-class bus, and reveals the close connection that Wilson felt to the poor indigenous people of this country.