Marie Johnson-Calloway

b. Baltimore, MD, 1920
d. 2018

Marie Johnson-Calloway was an artist and activist who combined dynamic patterning, colorful abstraction, and autobiographical narrative within her paintings and assemblages. The daughter of a Baptist preacher and a teacher, Johnson-Calloway conjured memories of her childhood in segregated Baltimore through monumental images of family and community members and multimedia shrines composed of textiles and cherished objects. Her figurative constructions – presented alone or in complex tableaus – are cut from plywood, painted to achieve a three-dimensional effect, and clothed in recycled garments. Johnson-Calloway placed domestic and found objects alongside the vibrant batik fabrics and cowrie shells sourced during her travels to Ghana to honor the joy and resilience of her community.  

Johnson-Calloway attended high school in Baltimore, Maryland, and received her teaching certificate from Coppin Teachers College in Baltimore in 1939. Johnson-Calloway completed her BA at Morgan State University in 1952, and her MFA at San Jose State University in California. In 1975, Johnson-Calloway received her doctoral equivalency degree from San Francisco State University. During the early 1950s, Johnson-Calloway traveled around the United States with her first husband, U.S. Air Force doctor Arthur Johnson. While stationed in Fairbanks, Alaska, Johnson-Calloway turned to painting scenes of Alaskan life and Inuit culture, using the white lead paint and scrap wood available to her. Her first show was held in the lobby of the Northern Lights Hotel in Fairbanks. In 1954, her family moved to San Jose, California, where she was hired as the first Black public school teacher in the city.  

Johnson-Calloway was active in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, becoming president of the San Jose chapter of the NAACP, where she worked to provide equal job opportunities to minority students. In 1965 she participated in the historic march in Selma, Alabama, an experience which changed the direction of her art. She recalled, “When I came back I felt as though abstract work had to go on hold. So I started painting my world around me.” The first of her new series depicted civil rights marchers. Over the following decade, Johnson-Calloway’s work grew more three-dimensional and began to incorporate wood and found materials.  

Johnson-Calloway also joined Art West Associated North, an organization of Black artists in San Francisco and an affiliate of Art West Associated, founded by printmaker Ruth Waddy in 1962. Both associations protested the exclusion of Black artists from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Oakland Museum, and highlighted the works of artists who had been marginalized in the white art world. Johnson-Calloway also taught art for the Santa Clara School District and in 1969 became an assistant professor at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. She continued her graduate studies at Stanford University, but left after encountering resistance to her proposed panel that included ‘Black Rage’ co-author Dr. Price Cobbs. In the 1970s she was hired as a joint professor of Black studies and art at her alma mater, San Jose State University. There she developed the curriculum on African American Art and began the school’s collection of art by Black artists. She was eventually hired full-time at San Francisco State University, where she worked until 1983. 

In the 1971 press release for her solo exhibition at Brockman Gallery, Johnson-Calloway reflected: “I am trying to create images which are intimate reflections of the lives of black people, images which are deeply rooted in black dreams, black suffering, black pride, black anger, black strength and black love.”  

In 1973, Johnson-Calloway left her first husband and moved to San Francisco, California. She continued to exhibit widely in the 1970s, including a landmark show in conjunction with Betye Saar at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1977. Saar would become a close friend and the two artists would exhibit together several times over the course of their careers. In 1987 at the Oakland Museum of California, Johnson-Calloway presented Hope Street, a collection of life-sized assemblages presented as vignettes of life in African American neighborhoods. In it she included familiar figures from her childhood and adulthood.  

Johnson-Calloway has been the subject of several institutional exhibitions, including Homecoming: Marie Johnson Calloway, Past and Present, Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD, 2006; and Marie Johnson Calloway: Legacy of Color, Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA, 2015. Her work was included in Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980, at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, 2011. Her work is represented in the collections of the San Jose State University, the California Museum of African American Art, and the Brooklyn Museum, NY, among others. A sought-after presenter and lecturer, Johnson-Calloway received awards from the Women’s Caucus for the arts of Northern California, the San Francisco Library Foundation Award, the Pioneers of African American Art, and the National Women’s Caucus for the Arts.