Leroy Johnson

Leroy Johnson (1937 – July 8, 2022) was a largely self-taught African American artist who used found materials to create mixed-media works. He was known for his paintings, assemblage sculptures and collages that were inspired, influenced and reflective of African American history and his experiences living in the inner city of Philadelphia. Early life and education Leroy Johnson was born in 1937 in the Eastwick community of Southwest Philadelphia to Harry and Louetta Cowan Johnson. His father worked as a janitor at the Frankford Arsenal. When Johnson was about 7 or 8 years old, he read Richard Wright’s novel “Native Son,” and asked his mother who wrote it, he said in video interviews. She said it was written by a “colored man,” he said. Then he heard a voice telling him that he would be an artist, and so he did, according to Johnson. As a child, he said, he enjoyed drawing and reading, and he copied cartoons. Will Eisner was among his favorite cartoonists, along with Milton Caniff, who drew “Terry and the Pirates.” He was also exposed to Life, Ebony and Jet magazines. He often visited the Free Library of Philadelphia. Johnson attended John Bartram High School, where he took commercial art classes. He won an award for sculpture in the Gimble Department Store Art Exhibit. As a student at Bartram, he and four of his commercial-art classmates formed an arts league. Johnson graduated in 1955. In 1957, the arts league made plans to mount an exhibit of their paintings, watercolors and sculptures. They told a newspaper reporter that they were planning to hold it at St. Cyprian Episcopal Church in the Elmwood section of Southwest Philadelphia but had not yet gotten permission from the Rev. Paul Washington, its pastor. All five were working other jobs, Johnson at the Philadelphia Quartermaster Depot.   Johnson did not attend art school to obtain a degree. He told one interviewer that art schools homogenized students into one way of thinking and he prided himself on being original. He studied at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts) and the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine. He earned a master’s degree in human services from Lincoln University in 1988. He got his master’s degree, he said, after being kicked out of a teaching at a private school because he didn’t have the right credentials.