Sargent Johnson

Sargent Claude Johnson was born on the seventh of October 1888 at Boston, Massachusetts, the youngest of six children of Anderson Johnson — a Black mail carrier of the Boston post office — and Lizzie Jackson Johnson, of Cherokee-and-African-American descent. He was orphaned by ten — both parents died in 1897 and 1902 — and was raised by his mother’s sister Sarah Lewis Jackson at the Worcester, Massachusetts working-class household.

He was placed at fifteen at the Worcester Boys’ Trade High School and at sixteen apprenticed to a Boston commercial photographer. He moved to Chicago in 1912 at twenty-four and to San Francisco in 1915, where he was admitted in 1919 at thirty-one to the California School of Fine Arts at Chestnut Street under the principal Mexican-born American sculptor Beniamino Bufano and the painter Ralph Stackpole. He completed the California School in 1923.

He undertook from 1923 in his San Francisco studio at 1101 Webster Street the principal portion of his sculptural career — predominantly polychromed terracotta and copper-and-glazed-ceramic busts and reliefs in a style that integrated the African mask traditions, the Mexican muralist polychromy of his teacher Bufano’s circle, and the Aaron Douglas (placed in this archive) Harlem-Renaissance line.

He was awarded the Otto H. Kahn Prize of the Harmon Foundation for African American artists in 1927 — for the Pearl ceramic bust — and the Robert C. Ogden Prize of the Harmon Foundation in 1929 for the Sammy bust. He was the only Bay Area artist to receive Harmon Foundation recognition in those years.

He was named in 1932 the first Black member of the San Francisco Art Association and the first Black artist to receive a Federal Art Project commission from the Works Progress Administration of San Francisco in 1933.

He completed under the Federal Art Project the principal public-works sculptural commissions of San Francisco of the 1930s — the cast-stone Three Mariners frieze of 1936 at the Maritime Museum at Fort Mason; the green-Vermont-marble organ screen of the Federal Building at the Civic Center of 1934; the four-paneled cast-stone relief of the Sunnydale Housing Authority at Visitacion Valley of 1939; and the Civilian Conservation Corps memorial relief at Cleveland of 1936.

He completed in 1935 the principal personal work of his career — the eight-foot polychromed wood sculpture Forever Free — a Black mother of the Reconstruction period with two children at her skirts. The sculpture is at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

He died at San Francisco on the tenth of October 1967 of complications of a stroke, at seventy-nine.

He is honored here as the principal Black sculptor of the Bay Area.