National Center for Afro-American Artists

Artist John Wilson, the sculptor behind “Eternal Presence” at the National Center for Afro-American Artists, has been a revered artistic figure in Roxbury for decades. A new exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts aims to showcase Wilson’s talent on a national scale.

When Edmund Barry Gaither relocated to Roxbury from Atlanta in 1969, the idea of creating a museum in the predominantly Black Boston neighborhood was just a seed in the mind of Elma Lewis, who had just formed the National Center for Afro-American Artists a year earlier.