Sargent Johnson

Sargent Johnson photographed by Consuelo Kanaga, 1934.

Brooklyn Museum

Sargent Johnson (1888-1967) envisioned and carved the frieze around the Maritime Museum entrance, which evokes bas-reliefs of ancient Egyptian temples and tombs. The tile mosaics of large sea forms on the museum veranda are also his design.

The first Black artist on the West Coast to earn national fame, Johnson was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His father was of Swedish descent and his mother of Black and Cherokee heritage. Orphaned at a young age, he and his six siblings grew up with their uncle, Sherman William Jackson, a school principal, and his wife, May Howard Jackson—herself a sculptor, artist, and pioneering figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

By 1915, Johnson had moved to San Francisco to study painting, drawing, and sculpture. Beniamino Bufano and Ralph Stackpole were among his teachers at the California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute). Through the 1920s and 1930s, Johnson steadily made a name for himself through exhibitions promoted by the San Francisco Art Association and the Harmon Foundation. His iconic sculptures from this period include Chester (1931) and Forever Free (1933).

In October 1935, Johnson told the San Francisco Chronicle, “It is the pure American Negro I am concerned with, aiming to show the natural beauty and dignity in that characteristic lip, 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.”

 

Detail of Sargent Johnson's mosaic tile murals on the veranda of the Maritime Museum.

NPS/J.Woerner

Later in his career, Johnson would depart from the representational and racialized art that had first made him famous, pursuing an interest in purer abstraction and design, as well as African and Pre-Columbian art. His work at Aquatic Park, completed in 1939, hints at this transition.

The WPA, in fact, had turned down Johnson’s first applications and only hired him after Hilaire Hiler interceded. Johnson then started as an assistant to his former teacher, Bufano, before leading his own projects. These included carved redwood organ screens for the California School for the Blind in Berkeley (1937) and the Athletics frieze at George Washington High School in San Francisco (1942)—a commission that had first gone to Bufano.

Though Hiler was art director of the Aquatic Park project, Johnson enjoyed a large amount of creative control. He supervised his own team of craftsmen, which included the mosaic artist Mohammed Zyani.

Johnson considered government sponsorship a pivotal point in his career. “It’s the best thing that ever happened to me because it gave me more of an incentive to keep on working,” he said in a 1964 interview for the Archives of American Art. “At the time things looked pretty dreary and I thought about getting out of it.... the WPA helped me to stay.”

Johnson also did commercial work, including commissions for the Matson post-war passenger liners SS Monterey and SS Lurline. In the 1980s, with such ships facing the scrapyard, the Maritime Museum tried to acquire one of his mosaics, featuring Polynesian boats on SS Monterey, to complement his other art in Aquatic Park.

Further Reading:

"Oral history interview with Sargent Johnson” by Mary McChesney, Smithsonian Archives of American Art. July 31, 1964.

LaFalle-Collins, Lizzetta, and Judith Wilson. Sargent Johnson: African American Modernist. California: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1998.