With a documentarian’s eye but a poet’s gaze, Leroy Johnson (1937-2022,
Philadelphia, PA) surveyed the pleasures, hardships, and contradictions
within the Philadelphia neighborhoods where he spent his life. Through his
occupations as a social worker, rehab counselor, teacher of disabled youth,
and school administrator, Johnson pierced the fabric of collective human
experience more deeply than most.
Constructed largely from materials found during his daily commutes, his
house sculptures are replete with the textures of reality. Johnson
represented the city as an accretion of marks. Intentional declarations
graffitied on walls hold equal weight as the subtle beauty of the residue of
life, of signage and surfaces worn and sunbleached past legibility—their
degradation becomes, through Johnson’s attention, painterly abstraction
authored not by a single artistic hand but by the vast social forces at play.
These sculptures are labyrinths of referent and possibility.
Leroy Johnson (1937-2022, Philadelphia, PA) received his master’s degree in
Human Services from Lincoln University in 1988. Johnson has presented
solo exhibitions at Margot Samel, New York, NY (2025); Mercer County
Community College, West Windsor, NJ (2023); The Clay Studio,
Philadelphia, PA (2022), among others. His work has been included in group
exhibitions at Villanova University Art Gallery (1983), the Camden County
Historical Society (1990), Cheltenham Center for the Arts (1996), Gloucester
County College (1998), The Clay Studio in Philadelphia (1997, 1999, and
2000), the Art Gallery at City Hall, Philadelphia (1998, 2015, 2017, and 2019),
the African Jazz Museum, Kansas City (2002), List Gallery at Swarthmore
College (2004), Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens (2011), and Tiger Strikes
Asteroid (2021). His work is in the collections of the American Museum of
Ceramic Art in Pomona, California and the Clay Studio in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania. ...
