Johnson, Sargent

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Johnson, Sargent

1887–1967
African American artist and sculptor whose work celebrated African American beauty.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Sargent Claude Johnson was the third of six children. His parents were Anderson Johnson, a Swedish immigrant, and Lizzie Jackson, who was of Native American and African American descent. Both parents died before Johnson was grown, and he spent much of his childhood with relatives in and around Washington, D.C., and, finally, in an orphanage in Worcester, Massachusetts. As an adolescent he studied music. After graduating from high school, he continued his pursuit of music and other arts in Boston and Chicago.

In 1915 Johnson moved to San Francisco, where he enrolled at the A. W. Best School of Art and married Pearl Lawson, with whom he later had a daughter. From 1919 to 1923 he studied at the California School of Fine Arts, where his work received several prizes. Among his teachers were the sculptors Ralph Stackpole and Beniamino Bufano; the latter is often called Johnson's mentor. By this time Johnson was creating busts and portraits, mostly of people he knew, in several media, including ceramics, wood, and watercolor.

In the mid-1920s Johnson's work was exhibited throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. The praise he received led to support from New York's Harmon Foundation, which sponsored further exhibits. In these shows, Johnson blended several materials into single sculptures of African Americans. Most of his works from this time are credited with demonstrating the beauty and grace of prominent black features, such as full lips and kinky hair, as well as emphasizing African American complexions through the use of copper and redwood.

Buoyed by the Harmon-sponsored exhibits in New York, Johnson's sculptures soon became popular among African Americans, especially those who were active in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. Johnson also owed a measure of his popularity to his politics: light-skinned enough to pass for white, he refused to do so, instead embracing his African heritage. Recognition for his work soon spilled over the bounds of the black community, and he gained an international recognition for what he was calling “a strictly Negro art.”

By the end of the 1930s, Johnson worked for the Federal Arts Project, a Depression Era works program for artists. He continued to live and work in San Francisco. Among his commissioned pieces were two 2-meter (8-foot) stone figures installed for the city's Golden Gate International Exposition, a large mosaic for a maritime museum, and a panel carved in relief for the California School for the Blind. During World War II (1939–1945) he created one of his best-known works, a large cast-stone frieze that adorns San Francisco's George Washington High School.

Beginning in 1945 Johnson made the first of several trips to Mexico, where he became influenced by Mayan and other native arts. In particular his study of Central American clay and ceramics led to similar uses in his work. By the 1950s he had largely abandoned his popular realistic sculptures for surreal and abstract arts executed in vivid colors. His work continued, however, to explore racial themes. He increasingly incorporated wood and enamel, and by the 1960s he had added rock, bronze, and welded wire to his repertoire. During the last years of his career Johnson was plagued by ill health; he died of a heart attack in 1967. At the time of his death his work had been displayed in nearly thirty major exhibitions.

See also Art, African American; Passing in the United States.

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