Miami exhibition explores Harlem Renaissance artist William H. Johnson’s final series of paintings
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The Harlem Renaissance artist William H. Johnson’s prescient, social justice-forward final series of paintings is a testament to courage. Fighters for Freedom, organised as a touring exhibition by the Smithsonian American Art Museum curator Virginia Mecklenburg, features 29 portraits of change-makers—including Black scientists, singers, educators, activists, musicians and international leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture. This is the first time that Johnson’s Fighters for Freedom series has been shown together as a single body of work, according to Mecklenburg, who adds that the artist had a deep understanding of the international connotations of the fight for freedom.
In search of artistic freedom
Johnson was born in 1901 in Florence, South Carolina. He led a Bohemian life, escaping poverty by hopping on a bus to study art in New York during the Great Migration. After living in Harlem, he followed a long tradition of Black artists who left the US for Europe in search of artistic freedom. He lived on the Continent for about a dozen years—first as an art student in Paris and later in Denmark, where he married the artist and weaver Holcha Krake in 1930.
Krake’s interest in Danish folk art influenced Johnson’s signature style, which was described at the time as “modern primitive”. Johnson’s subject matter was inspired by his full embrace of his Black Southern roots after returning home from Europe in 1938.
