Join our Community In Celebration Of Eternal Presence. The Big Head Festival is Roxbury's annual celebration around John Wilson's Eternal Presence at the National Center of Afro-American Artists, 300 Walnut Avenue.
The 9th Annual “Eternal Presence” Bighead Festival was held on the Juneteenth weekend in 2021 at the National Center of Afro-American Artists, 300 Walnut Ave, Roxbury, MA — presented by The Boston Juneteenth Committee with the National Center of Afro-American Artists. The festival's own site lived at BigHeadFestival.com.
The festival continued: the 11th Annual Big Head Festival — “The City That Sways Together, Stays Together” — was presented by The Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists & The Boston Mass Juneteenth Committee on Saturday, September 23rd, 2023, 1pm till dusk, at the Museum of the NCAAA, 300 Walnut Ave, Roxbury, MA.
Performances by:
John Wilson: Eternal Presence — a retrospective of drawings, paintings, prints, and sculpture by a remarkable artist whose career spanned nearly seven decades. Born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1922, Wilson was one of the many talented students who studied under Karl Zerbe at the Museum School in Boston during the 1940s.
He was part of a group that later became known as the Boston Expressionists. By considering his work with Léger in Paris, collaborations with the Taller de Grafica Popular in Mexico, and finally commemorative portraits of the late Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, viewers can trace a complex trajectory of the changing artistic and social landscape over the course of the last century.
Eternal Presence is a study for the full-size, seven-foot-tall sculpture which stands outside the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Roxbury, Boston. Designed as a tribute to the history of Black people in Massachusetts, this idealized head has what Wilson described as “a symbolic black presence infused with a sense of universal humanity.”
Imperial Kingdom Of Nubia
Host
The 2021 festival was sponsored by Verizon, Comcast, and RCN, with the MOER Foundation and Nubian Geographic (Imperial Kingdom Of Nubia) — and hosted with the National Center of Afro-American Artists. The original festival site was created by the MOER Foundation.
Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists
The festival home: the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, 300 Walnut Avenue, Roxbury, MA 02119. Festival contact: Bostonbighead@gmail.com · 617-442-9289.