Artist Spotlight: Sargent Claude Johnson

Overview 

Artist Name: Sargent Claude Johnson

Lived: 1888-1967

Synopsis: Sargent Claude Johnson was the first Black Modernist artist from the West Coast to gain national acclaim.

Johnson’s art made a national impact as part of the Harlem Renaissance (also called the Black Renaissance), even though he lived in California’s Bay Area and not in the movement’s center of Harlem in New York City.

His artistic work stands out because he was skilled in multiple mediums and he embraced Black identity at a time when many popular depictions of Black people were racist. Besides his work as an artist, he was a passionate and dedicated teacher who believed creativity was an essential civic value.

About the Artist

Early Life

Born in 1888, Sargent Claude Johnson was the middle of seven children. His father, Anderson, was a white Swedish American and his mother, Eliza, was a Black woman who was likely born into slavery. Before Johnson was born, his parents moved from Virginia to Boston so they could marry legally. After Anderson’s death, Eliza sought help from her relatives and the Catholic Church to help care for her children. Johnson’s mother’s family worked hard to ensure that he and his siblings received a good education, which was no small feat during the height of the Jim Crow era.

Johnson became an orphan at the age of 8 when his mother died in 1898. Johnson’s uncle enrolled all six children in sex-segregated convent schools run by nuns. Johnson and his brothers attended the Holy Family Institute near Mt. Holyoke, Massachusetts, while his sisters attended the Holy Providence convent school in Philadelphia. Despite being separated, the siblings stayed connected and saw each other whenever they could. Johnson’s school offered obligatory religious studies, secular studies, and emphasized the importance of music. Music became his favorite subject, and he took daily music theory and singing and weekly choir. After the eighth grade, the last grade available at the school, he attended a public high school where he studied arts. He then studied music at the School of Fine Arts, Boston.

After high school, Johnson joined one of his brothers to work in the passenger rail industry. Working in passenger trains during the late 19th and early 20th century was popular among Black people because it gave them the ability to travel the country while avoiding the third-class cars designated for Black passengers. Johnson was able to work as a dining car waiter because he was light-skinned, while dark-skinned Black workers worked as Pullman porters, who did everything from lugging baggage, shining shoes, and cleaning sleeping quarters during long, grueling shifts.

Career in California

Working on the passenger trains eventually took Johnson to California, where he settled permanently around 1915. He eventually got married and had a daughter, Pearl, in 1923. By 1925, he owned a house in a Black neighborhood of Berkeley.

By this point, Johnson was already creating art while he continued his artistic studies at Best’s Art School and the California School of Fine Arts (later renamed the San Francisco Art Institute). While he was in school, he studied with influential sculptors Ralph Stackpole and Beniamino Bufano.

Johnson gained exposure as an artist through the annual San Francisco Art Association exhibitions, where he won several awards in the 1920s and 1930s for his sculptures including Chester and Forever Free.

He also won awards in juried exhibitions put on by New York’s Harmon Foundation, an organization devoted to celebrating the artistic works of Black artists between 1928 and 1934. Some of Johnson’s art was selected to be part of the Harmon Foundation exhibitions, and these featured works went on national tours. The foundation also held a solo exhibition of Johnson’s work, organized in New York in 1935, and this cemented his place as an important Black artist. Besides his work as an artist, he supported himself as a gallery and studio employee and took on WPA government art projects. The Works Progress Administration (WPA, renamed Work Projects Administration in 1939) was created in 1935 as a program to help put unemployed people to work building infrastructure and public goods. As part of the U.S. government’s New Deal, the WPA sought to revitalize the economy during the Great Depression, which began in 1929 and ended in 1939.

After establishing himself nationally as an artist, Johnson became a teacher. He taught sculpture at Mills College in Oakland and ran workshops organized by the San Francisco Housing Authority. He believed creativity was an essential civic value and saw teaching as a way of sharing this value with others, especially working-class Black people experiencing the repressive effects of redlining and over-policing that continue to affect non-white people.

Johnson also worked commercially as an artist. In 1948, he was hired to create a mural for the exterior of Dohrmann’s department store in San Francisco. He created a modernist mural composed of enameled steel panels and marble for the exterior of the store.

Artistic Style

Influences

Sargent Claude Johnson drew from a wide variety of influences across his long career. Explore his primary influences:

Modernism: Modernism is an art movement from the early 20th century that emphasized experimentation and finding new forms of expression. Industrialization was changing society and daily life at a rapid pace, and Modernist artists attempted to create works that reflected those changes. However, in his Modernist works, Johnson worked to highlight diversity and inclusivity and made artworks that challenged stereotypes, especially when it came to non-white people.

Mexican Modernists and Indigenous Artisans: Johnson traveled to Mexico multiple times between the 1940s and 1960s, twice with other artists through scholarships awarded by the San Francisco Art Association and several other times on his own. His travels through Mexico took him to many cities and states including Mexico City; Puebla; Cuernavaca, Morelos; Veracruz; and Taxco, Guerrero, where he explored museums, archaeological sites, and artists’ studios. In Mexico City, he marveled at the murals by Mexican Modernist muralists Jose Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, whom he later had the opportunity to meet in the Palacio de Bellas Artes. He also traveled south to the state of Oaxaca where he explored Zapotec and Mixtec pottery made from barro negro, the area’s black clay. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Johnson was more interested in the contemporary and ancient artistic traditions of rural Mexican populations than in its big cities and major art centers.

The Pacific Rim: The Pacific Rim refers to the coastal regions bordering the Pacific Ocean. In 1915, the Panama-Pacific International Exposition was a world fair that ran for 10 months in the Bay Area of San Francisco. That year, people commonly thought of the Bay Area as being a central connection from the U.S. to Asia. That same year, Johnson moved to Berkeley and clearly became interested in Asian art. While living in Berkeley, he probably saw Buddhist sculptures that belonged to his Chinese and Japanese neighbors. Some of his early sculptures, including one of his infant daughter, look like Chinese Buddhist works. He also made a sculpture of a young Chinese American girl named Elizabeth Gee, who was a friend of his daughter. Johnson was able to travel to Japan more than once to learn more about Japanese art.

African Art, the Black Renaissance, and the New Negro Movement: Johnson never visited Africa, but his multiracial identity undoubtedly influenced his interest in African art. Art historian Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw said Johnson may have seen photos of West African masks and statues in an article by Black philosopher Alain Locke, an early supporter of Johnson’s work, about how Black people were represented in Western art. Johnson then created art directly inspired by the masks in Locke’s article. As one of the most influential thinkers and writers during the Harlem Renaissance, Locke saw how emerging Black artists were encouraged to emulate European artistic style and values. In response, he urged artists to embrace African influences. Johnson did just that. According to Locke, by 1936, Johnson’s work had “come to reflect more than any other contemporary Negro sculptor the Modernist mode and the African influence.” Johnson’s work aligns with Locke’s imperative to challenge racist art history assumptions and to celebrate modern Black culture and identity.

Mediums

Johnson searched relentlessly for his ideal medium. He was a painter, printmaker, engraver, sculptor, ceramist, enamellist, and mosaic artist who worked adeptly in all manner of sculptural materials including wood, ceramic, natural and cast stone, metal, and plaster.

In addition to mastering different mediums, he also created art in a wide range of sizes, from small to massive. For example, his 1945 terracotta sculpture The Cat is roughly the size of a shoebox, while his cast stone mural at George Washington High School in San Francisco runs the width of a football field.

The Cat is roughly the size of a shoebox.

The George Washington High School Athletics mural runs the width of a football field.

His interest in enamelwork piqued in 1947 when he met the owner of an Oakland company that specialized in manufacturing enamel-on-steel signs. For the next 20 years, Johnson taught himself the technique, perfected it, and made over 100 enameled works, including the aforementioned facade for Dohrmann’s department store in 1948. Despite his mastery of the medium, his works have been left out of the history of 20th century American enamel because he was self-taught and rarely submitted his enamel works for juried exhibitions.

Related Objects

Vocabulary

• Black Renaissance: A creative movement beginning around 1920 and through the 1930s that focused on the importance of African traditions. It encouraged artists to incorporate African influences into their work. Also known as the Harlem Renaissance.
• Enamelwork: A method of decorating metal that consists of applying and fusing glazes made of colored ground glass using high heat to produce glossy, bright colors.
• Medium: The techniques and materials artists use to shape their works artistically, such as sculpture, photography, painting, watercolors, wood, ceramic, and metal.
• Modernism: An art movement from the early 20th century that emphasized experimentation and finding new forms of expression.
• Terracotta: A type of ceramic made from clay that ranges in color from orange to red or brown.
• WPA: Short for Works Progress Administration, this program helped put unemployed people to work through building infrastructure, public goods, and art during the Great Depression, which began in 1929. It was part of the U.S. government’s New Deal, which sought to revitalize the economy during the Great Depression. It was renamed the Work Projects Administration in 1939.

Questions and Prompts 

Identity and Community

• Who played a role in shaping Johnson’s identity?
• What communities was Johnson a part of? How did those communities influence him? How did he influence those communities?
• Some of Johnson’s siblings chose to pass as white. Why might they have made that choice? Why might Johnson not have made that choice?

Communicating through Art

• Which mediums, techniques, and work processes did he use, and why did he make those choices?
• What did he intend for audiences to see, experience, and think about when viewing his work?
• In your opinion, which are the most successful aspects of his work? Share your reasoning.
• Johnson believed creativity was an essential civic value. Do you agree? Why or why not?

California

• What do you think may have motivated Johnson to move to California?
• What systems of power did Johnson encounter in California? How did he navigate those systems?

Authors, Contributors, and Reviewers

Coauthors

Victoria Gonzalez is the Digital Learning Specialist at The Huntington.

Rebecca Kon is the former Curriculum Development Specialist at The Huntington.

Contributors

Dennis Carr is the Virginia Steele Scott Chief Curator of American Art at The Huntington.

Lauren Cross is the Gail-Oxford Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts at The Huntington.

Reviewers

Kim Tulipana is the Associate Director of Public, School, and Digital Programs at The Huntington.

Renee Ergazos is an editor and the Owner and Managing Editor of Foresee Communications LLC.

References

Carr, D., Francis, J., & Bowles, J. P. (Eds.). (2024). Sargent Claude Johnson. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

Locke, A. (1925). The legacy of the ancestral arts. In The new negro: An interpretation (pp. 254–267). Albert and Charles Boni.

Museum of the American Railroad. (2019, April 24). The pullman porter. https://www.historictrains.org/collection/philippe-9z32w

Page, T. (2011, April 29). Rare chance to see artworks the Huntington might purchase. The Huntington. https://www.huntington.org/verso/2018/08/rare-chance-see-artworks-huntington-might-purchase

Shaw, G. D. (2012, June 6). Creating a new negro art in America: Relocating Sargent Johnson’s African-inspired art, (108), 75–87. Transition. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/478409

Turner-Lowe, Susan. (2013, October 11). Monumental and melodious. The Huntington. https://www.huntington.org/verso/2018/08/monumental-and-melodious

Underhill, J. (2019, April 24). Virtual model of a masterful wood carving. The Huntington. https://huntington.org/verso/2019/04/virtual-model-masterful-wood-carving