Mask

Johnson learned to work copper sheet metal in the 1920s as an assistant in the studio of the sculptor Beniamino Bufano, one of his instructors at the California School of the Fine Arts in San Francisco. The stylized oval of the face, generous lips, and wide nose reflect Johnson's aim to show the "pure American Negro." He said he wanted to depict the "natural beauty and dignity in that characteristic lip, that characteristic hair, bearing and manner." With Mask, Johnson situated the image of the black face within a dialogue about race taking place among Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes and other poets and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance.

African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond, 2012

"I am concerned with aiming to show the natural beauty and dignity in that characteristic lip, 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." --Sargent Johnson, 1935

Sargent Johnson rose to prominence in the 1930s by creating works steeped in ideas of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement of Black modernism throughout the 1920s and '30s. Mask is a nod to what artists and writers at the time considered the legacies of ancestral African art.

Label text from The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture November 8, 2024 -- September 14, 2025