Leroy Johnson

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. ...