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“Malvin Gray Johnson was active during the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s. He simplified the forms of his subjects and occasionally emphasized his African past by including African imagery in his paintings.” – Paintings by African Americans from the collection of the National Museum of American Art: A Book of Postcards (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art in cooperation with Pomegranate Artbooks, 1991).
Additional bio: Born in 1896, Malvin Johnson grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina in dire poverty. He managed to travel to New York to study at the New York Academy of Design. Although he only lived thirty-eight years, Johnson is highly esteemed by historians of black artists. In The Negro in American Culture, Margaret Just Butcher argued that some of his paintings “are among the most significant commentaries on the American Negro scene.” Alain Locke said that he captured the cynical humor and mythical desolation in the moods of blacks better than most artists. Viewing Johnson as a maturing experimentalist, James Porter wrote that his later work was expressed in “terse, pregnant patches of color.”

All Day Meetin’—

Dinner on the Ground (1934) by Malvin Gray Johnson was one of the featured works in Spirit of the Renaissance: The Art of William H. Johnson and Malvin Gray Johnson, a recent exhibition at the Community Folk Art Gallery. The paintings were on loan from the Hampton University Museum.

Meditation,” 1931, is one of Malvin Gray Johnson’s works on display
at the NCCU Art Museum. (Image courtesy of NCCU Art Museum)

Malvin Gray Johnson (Jan. 28, 1896 – 1934): Self-Portrait, 1934 – oil on canvas (Smithsonian)
“Malvin Gray Johnson was active during the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s. He simplified the forms of his subjects and occasionally emphasized his African past by including African imagery in his paintings.” – Paintings by African Americans from the collection of the National Museum of American Art: A Book of Postcards (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art in cooperation with Pomegranate Artbooks, 1991).
Additional bio: Born in 1896, Malvin Johnson grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina in dire poverty. He managed to travel to New York to study at the New York Academy of Design. Although he only lived thirty-eight years, Johnson is highly esteemed by historians of black artists. In The Negro in American Culture, Margaret Just Butcher argued that some of his paintings “are among the most significant commentaries on the American Negro scene.” Alain Locke said that he captured the cynical humor and mythical desolation in the moods of blacks better than most artists. Viewing Johnson as a maturing experimentalist, James Porter wrote that his later work was expressed in “terse, pregnant patches of color.”

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