Artist

Sargent Johnson

born Boston, MA 1887-died San Francisco, CA 1967
Also known as
  • Sargent Claude Johnson
Born
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Died
San Francisco, California, United States
Biography

"It is the pure American Negro I am concerned with, aiming to show the natural beauty and dignity in that characteristic lip and that characteristic hair, bearing and manner; and I wish to show that beauty not so much to the white man as to the Negro himself." — Sargent Johnson quoted in San Francisco Chronicle,

Luce Artist Biography

Sargent Johnson's first contact with art was through his aunt, the sculptor May Howard Jackson, who looked after him when he was young. Johnson's father was of Swedish ancestry and his mother was part Cherokee and part African American. While his brothers and sisters chose to be recognized as Native Americans or Caucasians, Sargent decided to live his life as a black man. He was orphaned in 1902 and lived in many different places before settling in North Beach, California. He created work for the Harmon Foundation, which supported African American art, and was also active in the Federal Art Project of the New Deal in the 1930s. Johnson's expressive sculptures in wood, terra-cotta, and clay explored his belief that "The Negroes are a colorful race; they call for an art as colorful as . . . can be made."

Exhibitions

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African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond
April 27, 2012–September 3, 2012
Smithsonian American Art Museum
African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond presents a selection of paintings, sculpture, prints, and photographs by forty-three black artists
Media - 1995.22.1 - SAAM-1995.22.1_1 - 65784
African American Art in the 20th Century
Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Smithsonian American Art Museum is home to one of the most significant collections of African American art in the world.

Related Books

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African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, The Civil Rights Movement, and Beyond
African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond offers a rich vision of twentieth-century visual culture. An essay by Richard Powell sets the stage: his analyses of works by Sargent Johnson, Renée Stout, Eldzier Cortor, and Alma Thomas give the reader a rubric for considering other works that range from the Harlem Renaissance to the decades beyond the civil rights era, a period that saw tremendous social and political change. The forty-three artists included here worked in every style current during those decades, from documentary realism to abstraction, from expressionism to postmodern assemblage. They consistently touch universal themes, but they also evoke specific aspects of the African American experience—the African Diaspora, jazz, and the persistent power of religion.
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African American Masters: Highlights from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
African American Masters focuses on black artists whose efforts in the twentieth century demonstrate their command of mainstream traditions as well as the open assertion and exploration of their dual heritage. Many—like Sargent Johnson, Lois Mailou Jones, James Porter, and William H. Johnson—responded in the 1930s and 1940s to Alain Locke's call for an art of the “New Negro” and explored the social and narrative aspects of African or African American sources. Others—Henry Ossawa Tanner, Beauford Delaney, and Norman Lewis—embraced broader themes or the modernist challenges of form and color. Contemporary artists—from Betye Saar and Mel Edwards to Renée Stout and Whitfield Lovell—have mined sources as varied as the autobiographical and the international. Horace Pippin and Purvis Young, as self-taught artists, tapped the spiritual and social underpinnings of their communities. Portraits and documentary images have dominated the subject matter of modern black photographers. James VanDerZee and Roland Freeman epitomize those photographers who have chosen the people and environment of their own neighborhoods as their subjects. Others, foremost among them Roy DeCarava and Gordon Parks, have sought out communities or traditions of the larger African American society.