Sargent Claude Johnson (1888–1967) was a pioneering Bay Area Black modernist artist whose career spanned the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement. Though best known as an award-winning sculptor, Johnson worked in a broad range of media—from painting and printmaking to enamelwork and ceramics—as well as a wide variety of sculptural media, from wood to natural and cast stone, metal, clay, and plaster. He was also an active participant in the New Deal-era Public Works of Art Project and the Federal Art Project, making large-scale architectural sculptures for institutions in the Bay Area, including the California School for the Blind in Berkeley and the Aquatic Bath House and George Washington High School in San Francisco. His work drew upon international artistic influences from Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America, and he was among the early generation of Black American artists to travel to Mexico and Japan. Through these connections and a decades-long artistic practice, Johnson actively worked to shape modernism into a diverse and inclusive space, creating art that upended stereotypes and forged new links across time and place. Johnson’s career was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at The Huntington last spring, co-curated with Profs. Jacqueline Francis of the California College of the Arts and John Bowles of UNC–Chapel Hill, the first survey exhibition in over twenty-five years about the artist.

Dennis Carr joined The Huntington as the Virginia Steele Scott Chief Curator of American Art in January 2020. For the previous 13 years, he was the Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His projects at The Huntington have included “Made in L.A. 2020: a version,” the biennial of contemporary art organized by the Hammer Museum, “Borderlands,” a reinstallation of the Virginia Steele Scott and Lois and Robert F. Erburu Galleries of American Art, and the recent exhibitions “Gee’s Bend: Shared Legacy” and “Sargent Claude Johnson,” which featured an accompanying catalogue. He holds graduate degrees in the history of art at Yale University and the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, and was a 2019 fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership.