Author: Dr. Jacqueline Francis in Conversation with Virginia Smyly

Jacqueline Francis and Virginia Smyly discuss the work of Sargent Claude Johnson, an important African American sculptor and artist with San Francisco connections. 

Following the opening of a major exhibition of Johnson's work at The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, Francis and Smyly will discuss this important artist and his influence on San Francisco and the world. Francis is co-curator of the exhibit and co-editor of its companion book, Sargent Claude Johnson (1888-1967) with Dennis Carr (The Huntington’s Virginia Steele Scott, Chief Curator of American Art) and John P. Bowles (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).

Johnson's powerful works — masks, portrait busts, and figural sculptures created in the 1920s and 1930s—have become emblems of the Harlem Renaissance. The exhibition will also include several art pieces by Johnson held by the San Francisco African American Historical and Cultural Society, which has an archive of early San Francisco African American history, life and culture. 

Around 1915, Johnson moved to San Francisco and studied art at the A.W. Best School of Art and the California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute). Johnson received government commissions and became one of the few African American supervisors in the Works Progress Administration nationwide. His largest work was a 185-foot-long, 12-foot-high cast-stone frieze (1942) made for the football field at George Washington High School and entitled "Athletics."

Jacqueline Francis, Ph.D., is Dean of the Humanities and Sciences Division at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She is a co-editor of Sargent Claude Johnson (2024), Is Now The Time for Joyous Rage? (2023) and Romare Bearden: American Modernist (2011). She is the author of Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America (2011) and is a contributor to Mary Ann Calo's African American Artists and the New Deal Art Programs (2023). In 2023, she was named to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts 100—recognition of her activism and innovative projects in the Bay Area region.

Virginia Smyly is a retired Public Health professional who heads the San Francisco African American Historical and Cultural Society's archive inventory project. She is a native San Franciscan, a graduate of Lowell H. S., University of California at Berkeley, and UCB’s graduate school, where she earned degrees in African American Studies, Anthropology, and Public Health. She is the author of 100 Years in Action: Booker T. Washington Community Service Center. Her vocation is historian and she is an amateur genealogist.