[3] As an active Boy Scout, Gilbert Wilson held a fifteen-year veteran pin and achieved a Silver Eagle rank.

In 1928 he began instruction at the Chicago Art Institute, where he exhibited at the Hoosier Salon and won two awards, as wells as a two-hundred dollar prize in 1929 and 1930.

During this time Wilson rendered color composition and design to rolls of architectural blueprints, did various household chores, came twice a month for the regular shopping tour to New York, and painted incidentals for the remainder of the Elks Memorial murals.

[4] Inspired by Rivera, Orozco and Savage, as well as Terre Haute-area thinkers like social activist Eugene Debs and writers Theodore Dreiser and Max Ehrmann,[5] much of Wilson's work concerns the plight of the common man.

[4] Wilson later recalled how seeing Orozco's work for the first time had been a revelation, saying, "From that moment on I knew it was what I wanted Art to be — a real, vital, meaningful expression, full of purpose and intention, having influence and relation to people's daily lives — a part of life.

He dealt with frustration and depression through much of his career, even destroying part of his own mural in Indiana State University's Laboratory School.

In 1960 Wilson was artist in residence at Kentucky State College and proposed a set of murals for the gymnasium depicting black history.

Called "Liberation", these large-scale chalk murals can be found directly inside the main entrance of the building and took Wilson three years to complete, ending in 1935.

[12] Wilson described in the 1939 Antioch Alumni Bulletin that "in the mural, where I have sought to paint the collapse of modern civilization under capitalism, it is but a picture of what one artist feels is ahead if something is not done.

"[12] After reading Herman Melville's Moby Dick in the late 1940s, Wilson created numerous artworks around the book, which he viewed as a guide for the betterment of humanity.

The elder Huston co-sponsored (with author Pearl S. Buck) an exhibition of Wilson’s work at New York City’s Arthur U. Newton Galleries in May 1949.

In 2016, during a visit to the Swope Art Museum, Elder saw the exhibition Good Intentions: Two Unrealized Projects by Gilbert Brown Wilson.

Co-curated by former director Susan Baley, and current curator Edward Trover, the exhibition displayed Wilson's Old Mister World and the Hue-Mans: A Fable of the Earth and the Atom, and panel studies for his unrealized Moby Dick mural for the library in Frankfort, Kentucky.

[17] Inspired by the exhibition, Robert K. Elder gathered images for the book Moby-Dick: Illustrated by Gilbert Wilson with publisher Hat & Beard Press.