Sargent Claude Johnson (November 7, 1888 – October 10, 1967) was one of the first African-American artists working in California to achieve a national reputation.

He worked in a variety of media, including ceramics, clay, stone, wood, terra cotta, tiled murals, watercolor, oil on canvas, porcelain enamel on steel, and lithography.

The same year, Sargent Johnson married Pearl Lawson and began studying drawing and painting at the A. W. Best School of Art.

[11] 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.

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.

"[14] 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.

[15][1] 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.

[2] As a member of the bohemian San Francisco Bay community and influenced by the New Negro movement popularized during the Harlem Renaissance, Sargent Johnson's early work focused on racial identity.

He moved from Berkeley to Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, and then, from 1948 to 1964, to 1507 Grant Avenue, where he lived very simply in two rooms and shared a studio in the building with ceramist John Magnani, a close friend from the early 1930s.

In 1998, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art mounted the first comprehensive survey of the artist's career with the exhibition Sargent Johnson: African-American Modernist.

[17] In 2009, the University of California, Berkeley unwittingly sold a work by Johnson for $164.63 including tax; gallerist Michael Rosenfeld later estimated its value at more than a million dollars.

The 22-foot set of carved redwood relief panels were originally an organ screen in an auditorium at the California School for the Blind, commissioned by the Works Progress Administration in 1937.

[17] The exhibition presented 43 works, including the Huntington's Head of a Boy (c. 1928) and, as its centerpiece, the organ screen reunited for the first time with other decorations made by Johnson for the same auditorium—a stage proscenium lent by the University of California, Berkeley and four lunettes (carved decorations above doorways) lent by the California School for the Blind in Fremont and by the African American Museum and Library at Oakland (part of the Oakland Public Library).