The Collection

Leroy Johnson was a largely self-taught mixed-media artist born in 1937 in the Eastwick section of Southwest Philadelphia. He attended John Bartram High School and, rather than pursue a formal art degree, studied at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, the Philadelphia College of Art, and the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine, later earning a master's degree in human services from Lincoln University in 1988.

Johnson began his career as a painter before turning to ceramics in the early 1960s, working across painting, collage, ceramics, and assemblage sculpture for the rest of his life. Describing himself as an "urban expressionist," he drew on found materials, photographs, street signage, and clay dug from across Philadelphia to reflect on African American history and inner-city life. Beginning in the early 1990s, he became known for tender, maximalist house sculptures, miniature rowhouses built from found materials that functioned as totemic sites where personal psychology met broader social and political forces. His major series include "Street Scenes," "Lynching Series," "Men with Hats," and "Brickyard Series."

Johnson was active in Philadelphia's Black Arts Movement beginning in the 1960s and was a resident artist at the Clay Studio (1995–2001), the Center for Emerging Visual Artists, and the Barnes Foundation's Mural Arts residency (2019). He received a 2014 Pew Fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, along with grants from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Independence Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Johnson exhibited widely over more than five decades, including solo exhibitions at Philadelphia's Magic Gardens (2011), the Tirza Yalon Kolton Ceramic Gallery in Tel Aviv (1999), and Swarthmore College's List Gallery (2004), and was included in the Woodmere Art Museum's We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s–1970s (2015). His work is held in the collections of the American Museum of Ceramic Art, the Clay Studio, and the Harvey and Jennifer Peyton Collection. Johnson died in Philadelphia on July 8, 2022, at age 85. In 2025, Margot Samel Gallery presented the first solo exhibition of his work in New York, drawn from the artist's estate.