b. 1937, United States
d. 2022
With a documentarian’s eye but a poet’s gaze, Leroy Johnson(1937–2022, Philadelphia, PA) surveyed the pleasures, hardships, and contradictions within the Philadelphia neighbourhoods where he spent his life. Through his occupations as a social worker, rehab counsellor, teacher of disabled youth, and school administrator, Johnson pierced the fabric of collective human experience more deeply than most.
Constructed largely from materials found during his daily commutes, his house sculptures are replete with the textures of reality. Johnson represented the city as an accretion of marks. Intentional declarations graffitied on walls hold equal weight with the subtle beauty of the residue of life, of signage and surfaces worn and sunbleached past legibility—their degradation becomes, through Johnson’s attention, painterly abstraction authored not by a single artistic hand but by the vast social forces at play. These sculptures are labyrinths of referent and possibility.