Sargent Johnson

Sargent Claude Johnson was born on the seventh of October 1888 in Boston, Massachusetts, the third of six children of Anderson Johnson, a man of Swedish descent, and Lizzie Jackson Johnson, who was of African-American and Cherokee heritage. Orphaned young — his father died in 1897 and his mother of tuberculosis a few years later — Sargent and his siblings came under the care of relatives, and he lived for a time with his aunt, the pioneering sculptor May Howard Jackson, whose example planted the seed of the vocation he would carry all his life.

In 1915 he settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he would remain for the rest of his days. He studied at the A. W. Best School of Art and then at the California School of Fine Arts under sculptors Beniamino Bufano and Ralph Stackpole. Working in terra-cotta, wood, stone, clay, ceramics, enamel, and lithography, he devoted his art above all to the dignity and beauty of Black people — most famously in his effort, in his own words, to "show the natural beauty and true worth of the Negro" and to redefine the image of the African-American woman.

Through the 1920s and 1930s his reputation grew nationally. He won repeated honors from the Harmon Foundation, and in 1932 he became the first Black sculptor elected to the San Francisco Art Association. As the principal Black sculptor of the Bay Area Federal Art Project during the Depression, he created enduring public works, including sculptural and tile installations that still stand in California.

Sargent Johnson died in San Francisco on the tenth of October 1967. Though he lived far from Harlem, he is counted among the finest artists of the Harlem Renaissance — a maker who taught stone and clay to speak of a people's worth. May his hands, and the beauty they honored, be remembered.