Francis Boscia

The painting below is known as “Sowing” and the artist behind it is a man named William H. Johnson (1901-1970). Johnson had a dream of making art that showed the lifestyles of African Americans in both Harlem and the South but he wanted to do it in a way that was different. Johnson became skilled in a specific type of art called silkscreen prints. These prints had quite vibrant colors that popped out of the artwork. The piece below (Sowing) was one of those silkscreens he made.

In Sowing, there is an African American woman in front clutching seeds in one of her hands as her other hand spreads the seed throughout the field. Behind her is an African American man following a mule pulling a plow that he guides. Johnson’s main goal of this piece was to show how Johnson grew up. Johnson grew up in Florence county South Carolina which is a very rural area. Johnson was born into a poor family and worked on a farm for most of his youth. When Johnson was seventeen, he moved to Harlem (1918). While there Johnson worked many jobs to afford an education in art. Johnson was a talented artist and by the time he turned twenty he had studied various styles of art in France. This is where Johnson picked up the silkscreening technique that he adapted to his own artistic expressions.  While this piece can be compared to slavery it is much more comparable to the reconstruction after the Civil War. After the Civil War, a practice known as sharecropping grew in popularity. Freed slaves had nowhere to go and couldn’t really get jobs, so landowners would provide them with housing and fields to do work in, and in return, the owner would get a share of the crops that were harvested. This art piece can easily be interpreted as such. There are two African Americans in a field working with a mule and there is a little house in the background that they would have stayed in.

This piece is definitely an eye-catcher. While it doesn’t look like a grand portrait of an old white guy who won a war, this piece does have a rich history behind it that I found quite interesting. A huge thank you to the Gibbs Museum located in Charleston, SC for letting me as well as my classmates come visit and tour their museum! I enjoyed my visits and learning about some of the artists there including William H. Johnson.

Works cited:

“Sowing – William H. Johnson – GOOGLE Arts & Culture.” Google, Google, https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/sowing-william-h-johnson/iQGGUfp0IVjR9A?hl=en.