Johnson was a major figure in twentieth-century African American art. Born in South Carolina, he traveled extensively throughout Africa and Europe, living for extended periods in France and Scandinavia. Though he experimented with realism and expressionism, he is best known for the flat, consciously naive style he adopted after his return to the US in 1938, using a palette of only four or five colors. His output during this period depicts African American subjects—farm workers, street musicians, market shoppers, churchgoers, chain gangs, etcetera—sometimes even working them into biblical narratives, as we will see in station 13.