Good Intentions: Two Unrealized Projects by Gilbert Brown Wilson

October 7, 2016 – January 7, 2017 - This exhibition will feature two of Wilson’s visionary projects intended to influence people’s daily lives: 1954 drawings for an animated film titled “Old Mister World and the Hue-Mans: A Fable of the Earth and the Atom” and murals painted in the mid-1970s for a public library in Frankfort, Kentucky. Unfortunately, neither project came to fruition. Wilson’s concern about atomic energy is a common theme in the projects. The colorful Hue-Mans drawings are cartoon-like, yet many of the rainbow-colored figures–reflecting Wilson’s belief in racial equality–carry tiny atomic bombs in their pockets. The murals were based on Wilson’s favorite book–Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, which Wilson interpreted as a guide for humanity’s future in the atomic age. For Wilson, the white whale was correlated to atomic power with its capacity for good and evil.