Sargent Claude Johnson

Early life and education Sargent Johnson was the third of six children, born to a father of Swedish descent and his mother of African-American and Cherokee ancestry. His father died in 1897, and his mother died of tuberculosis in 1902. Sargent, at fifteen, along with his siblings, went to live with their uncle, Sherman Jackson Williams, and his wife, May Howard Jackson, in Washington, D.C. May was a pioneer African-American sculptor specializing in portrait busts with Negro themes, and she undoubtedly influenced Sargent Johnson at an early age. Later, the boys of the family were sent to an orphanage in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the girls to a Catholic school for African-American and Native-American girls in Pennsylvania. As adults, some of Sargent's siblings chose to identify as either Native Americans or Caucasians. Sargent identified as African American.

In 1915, Sargent Johnson moved to the San Francisco Bay area.

Career Chester appeared in the 1931 Harmon Foundation touring exhibition. The terra cotta sculpture is now in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Johnson in his studio in a Harmon Foundation photo now at the National Archives at College Park. In a 1920 San Francisco city directory, Johnson's profession was listed as "artist." A 1921 directory listed him as "picture framer". (Johnson is said to have worked for Valdespino Framers for about 10 years.

Beginning in 1927, Johnson's works were included in annual touring exhibitions mounted by the Harmon Foundation of New York, known for supporting African-American art.

The 1931 Harmon exhibition featured Sargent's terra cotta portrait of a boy, Chester, on the cover of the exhibition catalogue. Depicting a neighborhood boy whom the artist described as "that kid [who] used to come to my studio," the work would become Sargent's most award-winning sculpture, "exhibited and published widely during his lifetime, adding to his fame as one of the most-recognized Black sculptors in America." Also in 1933, Sargent replicated the image in three dimensions with the painted plaster and wood sculpture Forever Free, perhaps his most iconic work, which is now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Inspired by Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Sargent, according to one critic, "produced witty, sophisticated work that ranges from jaunty interpretations of African masks to lithographs to small-scale figures."

In the late 1930s, Sargent Johnson received commissions from the Federal Arts Project (FAP).

In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in 1935, Johnson said, "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. Unless I can interest my race, I am sunk...I am interested in applying color to sculpture as the Egyptian, Greek, and other ancient people did...I am concerned with color, not solely as a technical problem, but also as a means of heightening the racial character of my work. The Negroes are a colorful race; they call for an art as colorful as they can be made." He had suffered from severe angina pectoris for nearly two decades.

Photographer Consuelo Kanaga said of Johnson, "He was beautiful in his spirit, the way he talked, the way he thought, the way he worked, the way he felt. I don't mean he didn't have problems. He did—terrible problems—but he was still beautiful. It was his spirit, the way he looked at everything." A large proscenium made by Johnson for the same theater was retained by UC Berkeley, and is now in the collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.)

In 2024, the Huntington Library presented Sargent Claude Johnson, the first show devoted to the artist since the 1998 exhibition at SFMOMA.

Works by Sargent in various media are in the collections of: Amistad Research Center, New Orleans Brooklyn Museum Hampton University Museum, Hampton, Virginia Kinsey African American Art and History Collection Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Museum of Modern Art, New York. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Newark Museum of Art The New Museum New Orleans Museum of Art Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University Oakland Museum of California, San Diego Museum of Art San Francisco African American Historical and Cultural Society San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Smithsonian American Art Museum

Perhaps the largest and most varied repository of Johnson's art (more than 25 pieces) is in the privately held Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art in San Francisco.

At auction In 2010, Swann Galleries in New York auctioned Johnson's Untitled (Standing Woman), a painted terra cotta sculpture made c. 1933-35, for $52,800, an auction record at the time for the artist. The work is now in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum.

In 2017, Swann Galleries auctioned Untitled (Negro Mother) (copper repoussé with paint, 1935-6) for $100,000.

In 2019, a new auction record for the artist was set by Head of a Negro Boy (painted terra cotta mounted on a wood base, c. 1934), auctioned at Swann Galleries for $125,000.