“Beloved legend”: Leroy Johnson, an inventive and prolific Philadelphia artist, has died

Leroy Johnson, 85, a tireless artist who worked in a variety of media beginning at the onset of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and continuing down to the present day, died Friday, July 8, in Philadelphia, a city that fascinated him endlessly.

Friends said the cause was lung cancer.

“It’s a substantial loss,” said Mr. Johnson’s longtime friend and fellow artist Candy Depew, who is known professionally as Candy Coated.

“He had a definitely unique vision,” said William Valerio, director and CEO of Woodmere Art Museum. “His subject is the city of Philadelphia and its history and everything that flows through that history.”

“His art does not sit passively and wait for you to become interested,” said Valerio. “It reaches out to you. He’s probably most well-known for these boxlike house sculptures that are so much about the city of Philadelphia, but also about the history of African American life as it passes through the life of the city.”

Depew met Mr. Johnson about 20 years ago through their mutual involvement with the Clay Studio in Old City.

“He and I met at the Clay Studio as resident artists,” she said. “We also taught classes and there was a Clay Mobile that was an outreach program that went into schools and community centers in Philadelphia, reaching out to kids that normally wouldn’t get a chance to work with art.”

Mr. Johnson made such an impression as a teacher that decades later, adults would stop him on the street to say he gave them their first taste of art in kindergarten, she said.

“He was a social worker for a long time — his business was people,” Depew said. “He just was a real magical guy that helped a lot of people because he was able to relate to them. Just a friendly, friendly person, an excellent artist, a voracious reader. He kept working every day even up to while he was in hospice care.”

Genevieve Carminati, a writer and poet, said she first met Mr. Johnson 50 years ago when they worked in an alternative school.

“He was like a vice principal and a counselor at the school and I was teaching,” she recalled. “These were inner-city schools for learning-disabled children. He always taught in all kinds of programs for children with all kinds of challenges.”

Mr. Johnson told her that he was inspired to be an artist as a young boy.

“He told an interesting story from his childhood,” she said. “When he was maybe about 8 years old, he was, even at that age, quite an avid reader. He read Black Boy by Richard Wright and he asked his mother who wrote that book. And using the term of the day she said, ‘A colored man wrote it.’ And then he said, he heard the voice of God say, ‘And you will be an artist.’”

It was a galvanizing moment for the small child, she said. For one thing, he knew that being an artist was “his mission.” But also, the accomplishment of Wright told him “it would be possible for him as an African American to do something like that.”

The point of the story, she said, was Mr. Johnson was aware at an early age of “prejudices against him.”

“But also,” she added, “that this was an enormous responsibility and honor to be able to be an artist.”

Mr. Johnson, an accomplished painter, drawer, and sculptor, as well as a ceramic artist, spent five years as a resident artist at the Clay Studio in the early 2000s.

“His work was very focused on the city as a topic — the city of Philadelphia but also cities in general as faces of life and energy and imagination and emotion.,” said Jennifer Zwilling, curator and director of artist programs at the Clay Studio. Mr. Johnson, she said, was “a beloved legend” among artists involved with the studio.

“He would come in and everybody would say, ‘Hey, look who’s here,’ and all would gather around,” she said.

Mr. Johnson was born in Philadelphia and grew up in the Eastwick section of the city. He attended classes at Fleisher Art Memorial and studied at the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts). He went on to earn a master’s degree in human services at Lincoln University.

Beginning in the late 1960s, he exhibited widely, at such venues as Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens; Tirza Yalon Kolton Ceramic Gallery in Tel Aviv; Gloucester County College; the University of Pennsylvania; and the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in Pittsburgh.

Over the years, he received grants from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Independence Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. And in 2014 he was named a Pew Fellow in the Arts.

In 2019, he was resident at the Barnes Foundation. His most recent residency was at the Center for Emerging Visual Artists in Philadelphia, where he worked until January of this year.

“It was an awesome experience for us, actually, just to be working and it’s such a profound experience for me personally,” said Genevieve Coutroubis, CFEVA executive artistic director. “He was working in our studio, in our gallery, and had his artwork there, and was making work and was connecting with the public in that space. So it was really an important, a profound experience for all.”

Karen Warrington, a journalist, filmmaker, activist, and observer of cultural Philadelphia for decades, knew Mr. Johnson since the 1960s.

“His energy, his love of art, and his view of the world, which he presented, I think, as an esteemed public artist just never abated over all these years,” she said. “I’d known him for so long and he still had all this energy and this joy of sharing his vision of what he saw, especially of urban Philadelphia.”

Mr. Johnson often described himself as an activist or an “activist-artist.” He did not see art separated from life or politics, he said, particularly Black life and politics.

“The only voice that we have now, because of the Supreme Court, is art,” Mr. Johnson once said. “Art is one of the few places where minorities, people who are disempowered can have a chance to say something. ... We should respect and enjoy our diversity and preserve our unique customs and share them without fear and hostility.”

Mr. Johnson is survived by a sister, Elaine Johnson of Philadelphia.

A funeral is scheduled for 1 p.m. Friday, July 15, at Laurel Hill Funeral Home, 225 Belmont Ave., in Bala Cynwyd. Family will accept donations of good deeds or contributions to the Fleisher Art Memorial in lieu of flowers.