*The Holmes Collection of African American Art began with a Sargent Johnson piece (The Cat).  Melvin recalled seeing pieces around town in San Francisco and went into a local gallery to inquire about how to purchase one of his works.  The gallery owner said that Johnsons were so rare he may as well be looking for a Picasso.  There are currently over 25 pieces by Sargent Johnson in the collection.  

Sargent Claude Johnson (October 7, 1888 – October 10, 1967) was one of the first African-American artists working in California to achieve a national reputation.[1] He was known for Abstract Figurative and Early Modern styles. He was a painter, potter, ceramicist, printmaker, graphic artist, sculptor, and carver. He worked with a variety of media, including ceramics, clay, oil, stone, terra-cotta, watercolor, and wood.[2] He was in the Communist Party for most of his life.[1]

Sargent Johnson was the third of six children, born to a father of Swedish descent and mother of African-American and Cherokee ancestry. His father died in 1892, leaving the kids to be raised by their mother. In 1902, when his mother died, the boys of the family were sent to an orphanage in Worcester, Massachusetts and the girls to a Catholic school for African American and Native American girls in Pennsylvania. At a young age, Sargent and his siblings went to live with their uncle, Sherman Jackson Williams, and his wife, May Howard Jackson. May was a famous sculptor specializing in Negro themes, and she undoubtedly influenced Sargent Johnson at an early age. Some of his siblings did not identify themselves as African American, and chose to live as either Native Americans or Caucasians, though Sargent identified as African American.

Sargent Johnson began showing his work with the Harmon Foundation of New York in 1926. Through the foundation, known for its support of African-American art, he exhibited many of his pieces and became locally and then nationally known.[5] There was a total of 87 pieces displayed at the show and a $150 prize for most outstanding work went to Johnson, “showing a porcelain head of a Negro child, Pearl, and two drawings, one of which, Defiant, is massively constructed and as simple in its planes as is so much of the modern Mexican work."[6] He was usually not included in "American art” because of how his pieces ignored traditional western techniques and were inspired by foreign cultures, such as Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and others.

In 1928, Johnson's award-winning artwork garnered him fame amongst artists in the Harlem Renaissance movement.

In the late 1930s, Sargent Johnson commissioned his work with the Federal Arts Project (FAP).[1] As a member of the bohemian San Francisco Bay community and influenced by the New Negro Movement, Sargent Johnson's early work focused on racial identity.

Johnson said, “It is the pure American Negro I am concerned with, aiming to show the natural beauty and dignity in that characteristic lip and 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. Unless I can interest my race, I am sunk.”[3] According to Johnson, "Negroes are a colorful race; they call for an art as colorful as they can be made."[7]

Beginning in 1945, and continuing through 1965, Sargent Johnson made a number of trips to Oaxaca and Southern Mexico and started incorporating the people and culture, particularly archeology, into his work. Other subjects included African American figures, animals, and Native Americans.

On February 23, 2010, Swann Galleries auctioned Sargent Claude Johnson’s Untitled (Standing Woman), a painted terra cotta sculpture, c. 1933-35, for $52,800 - an auction record at the time for the artist. In 2009 the University of California, Berkeley unwittingly sold a work by Johnson for $164.63, that was later valued at more than a million dollars. The 22-foot carved redwood relief panel was eventually purchased by the Huntington Library and will be displayed in its new American wing.[8]

Bio courtesy of Wikipedia. Link to full bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargent_Claude_Johnson