This story aired in the October 6, 2025 episode of Crosscurrents.
Some of San Francisco’s most famous murals — like the ones at Coit Tower or the Beach Chalet — came from the New Deal era in the 1930s.
That’s when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration created all kinds of programs to help people who lost everything during the Great Depression.
But there’s an artist from that same period who is less well known: the Black sculptor Sargent Johnson, a Harlem Renaissance artist working in the Bay Area.
Reporter Sheryl Kaskowitz uncovers some of the treasures that Johnson left behind, taking us back to a time when the federal government made support for artists, and public art, a priority.
It’s the second episode of "The Public Works," a series about how the New Deal transformed the Bay Area and what lessons we can learn from it today.
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Story Transcript:
Sound of people talking and playing pickleball
REPORTER: I’m tagging along on a tour of Treasure Island, and we’ve ended up in sort of an unexpected spot: it’s a padel and pickleball gym in an old airplane hangar.
ANNE SCHNOEBELEN: Watch your step everybody, please.
REPORTER: The tour is being led by Anne Schnoebelen. She’s on the board of the Treasure Island Museum and an expert about the island’s history.
It all started in the 1930s. That’s when Treasure Island was literally built from scratch by FDR’s New Deal, a series of programs designed to lift the country out of the Great Depression. One of those programs paid for the Army Corps of Engineers to dump sand from the bottom of the bay on rocks next to Yerba Buena Island, where the two spans of the Bay Bridge meet.
SCHNOEBELEN: All this sand from the bottom of the bay, and God only knows what else was in there.
REPORTER: The eventual plan was to turn Treasure Island into an international airport for sea planes — hence this enormous hangar. But this tour isn’t about planes — there’s a different piece of the island’s history hiding in here.
When we get to the back of the pickleball gym, Schnobelen opens a makeshift plywood door.
Sound of wood panel opening
SCHNOEBELEN: It’s the inner sanctum.
REPORTER: Stepping behind the gym is like discovering a lost world, because in a corner of the hangar back here, next to some discarded furniture, are these huge statues of people — more than lifesize — there have to be 10 or more.
Pacific Unity sculptures in storage at Treasure Island
Sheryl Kaskowitz
Because the first thing that happened at Treasure Island was a world’s fair, which opened in 1939.
NEWSREEL NARRATOR (archival tape): Here is a dream come true. The Golden Gate International Exposition, on man-made Treasure Island.
REPORTER: And art was everywhere at the exposition. There were fountains decorated with statues like these, and ornate buildings covered with mosaics. The famous muralist Diego Rivera was there, almost hanging from the rafters at a huge exhibit where visitors could watch as he and other artists worked.
These ones in the hangar are the Pacific Unity sculptures, designed to represent different people of the Pacific, arranged around a huge fountain. Each pair was done by a different artist.
SCHNOEBELEN: So South America, Sargent Johnson.
REPORTER: Schnoebelen directs me to two sculptures toward the back, one behind the other.
SCHNOEBELEN: They're Inca warriors sitting on llamas wearing elaborate costumes, with these very sedate looking, very noble looking animals. These are my favorite. They're really wonderful.
REPORTER: Most of the structures built for the exposition were made to be temporary, and were torn down once it was over.
Some of the art, like Diego Rivera’s mural, ended up at City College. But these statues stayed on the island. A few lucky ones have been on display near the Treasure Island Museum, but most of them are here, hiding in storage.
I wanted to learn more about the artists who made them, like Sargent Johnson. Because New Deal–era art from Johnson and other artists is still around, all over the Bay Area, even if you haven’t noticed it.
NOEMESHA WILLIAMS: I've never really just sat and looked at this piece because I see it every day, so it blends in the background.
Sound of seagulls
REPORTER: A few months after my Treasure Island tour, Ranger NoeMesha Williams and I are outside the Maritime Museum building at Aquatic Park in San Francisco. This is a popular area for tourists to ride the cable car and for locals to swim in the bay.
Williams has worked here at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park for 17 years, so it makes sense that this carving on the outside of the building has blended into the scenery.
WILLIAMS: But I'm looking at it now and it's very beautiful. Like, you can see the textures of the fins and the scales.
REPORTER: It’s carved in green slate, decorated with abstract figures and shapes evoking the sea — curved lines and spirals, dockworkers, ropes and lifesavers, fish, and dolphins.
Green slate carving around entrance of the San Francisco Maritime Museum
Sheryl Kaskowitz
Part of Williams’s job has been to give tours of this Maritime Museum building, which was originally built as a public bathhouse for Aquatic Park, in 1939.
WILLIAMS: I don’t know if you noticed, but this building looks like a ship.
REPORTER: It’s a curved, all-white art deco building with tiered levels like a cake and a wide deck on top, sitting right on the waterfront.
WILLIAMS: It was made during the Depression. So people didn't have a lot of money to, you know, go out and travel. So this was like their hangout spot.
REPORTER: Williams points to a circular mark on the ground in front of the entrance.
WILLIAMS: It's the stamp from the 1930s and it has the eagle that is stamped right in front of the door of our Maritime Museum building.
Round engraving of an eagle and “WPA” in the concrete at the San Francisco Maritime Museum
Sheryl Kaskowitz
REPORTER: In big block letters at the top, it says, “WPA.” That’s the Works Progress Administration — one of FDR’s New Deal programs created to put unemployed people to work during the Great Depression. The federal government built many public recreation buildings like this one. It was part of a larger effort to “make everyday life nicer for everyone,” as the historian Eric Rauchway put it.
And to help make these public buildings beautiful, the government hired out-of-work artists. There’s a famous story about Harry Hopkins, the director of the WPA, when he was pressed about why the federal government was spending money on artists, and he responded, “Hell, they've got to eat just like other people."
There’s actually another important marker I’m looking for on this entryway. It’s easy to miss, but in a corner of the green slate carving around the front door, there’s some small, elegant lettering, in all-caps:
WILLIAMS: It says Sargent Johnson, Federal Art Projects, WPA.
Sign on the carving outside the San Francisco Maritime Museum reading, “Sargent Johnson, Federal Art Projects, WPA”
Sheryl Kaskowitz
REPORTER: So in 1939, the same year that those llama statues were on display at Treasure Island, Johnson was also making art here, funded by the government.
JACQUELINE FRANCIS: Sargent Claude Johnson, as he's known now, is an artist who had a reputation in the 1920s and 1930s, not only here in California where he lived and worked, but his work was shown nationally.
Jacqueline Francis is an art historian and a dean at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She recently contributed to an exhibit of Johnson’s work at the Huntington in Southern California. In the art world, Sargent Johnson is a big deal — he was one of the few African American artists from the West Coast to get national recognition.
Johnson was born in Boston in 1888. His parents had moved there from Virginia so that they could get married legally as an interracial couple.
He came to the Bay Area around 1915, and studied at what’s now known as the San Francisco Art Institute. A lot of his work connected with the ideas from the Harlem Renaissance, which was about celebrating Black identity and culture.
FRANCIS: So he built his reputation in the 1920s, even winning awards for some of his sculptural work.
REPORTER: But as the effects of the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, commissions started to dry up.That’s where the New Deal comes in. Johnson was hired by New Deal projects to make art all over the Bay Area. First, an enormous redwood wall carving for the California School for the Blind in Berkeley.
Then he was hired by the WPA’s Federal Art Project, and assigned to work here, at the Aquatic Park bathhouse. He actually oversaw a whole crew of workers.
FRANCIS: And we think that Johnson was one of two black artists in California who were supervisors on Federal Art Project commissions.
REPORTER: The New Deal’s programs were supposed to be nondiscriminatory, but that’s not what always happened on the ground. In the ‘30s, Jim Crow segregation laws were still in place, and discrimination was widespread. So it was a big deal that a Black artist like Johnson held a supervisor role.
And that government support meant a lot to him. Here’s what he said about the WPA in an oral history with the Smithsonian Archives of American Art:
SARGENT JOHNSON (archival tape): It’s the best thing that ever happened to me because it gave me more of an incentive to keep on working, where at the time things looked pretty dreary and I thought about getting out of it. I thought I’d given it up at one time, but I think the WPA helped me to stay.
REPORTER: He thought he was going to give up on art, but the WPA helped him stay.
Today, it feels like a lot of Johnson’s public art is missing from the Bay Area. It isn’t just those statues hiding in storage on Treasure Island; UC Berkeley mistakenly sold the main panel of that redwood wall carving he did for the California School for the Blind. And animal sculptures he made for kids to play on at public housing projects had been destroyed by the 1960s.
But art historian Jacqueline Francis sees it differently.
FRANCIS: Maybe the work is seen as a little bit out of sight, but I feel like if it's hidden, it's hidden in plain sight.
REPORTER: You could say that about a lot of WPA artists — their work can be found in public spaces all over the Bay Area, even if we might not notice it. And it’s also true about Johnson. Smaller panels of his redwood carving can still be seen in Fremont and Oakland. At San Francisco’s Washington High School, there’s a giant stone relief wall he created along the entire length of the football field, a big enamel mural at Richmond’s City Hall, and there’s more back here at Aquatic Park.
Sound of front doors opening and entering building
Inside the Maritime Museum building, the walls are covered with murals by lots of WPA artists — I feel like I could do a story about every one of them. But Noemesha Williams and I are headed back outside, to the deck overlooking the bay.
Sound of doors opening and exiting building
WILLIAMS: So this is the veranda of the main lobby on the second floor.
REPORTER: Wow.
REPORTER: Once you walk out here, it’s tempting to just take in the view. But turning around to look back at the building, there are these gorgeous tile mosaics of abstract ocean scenes in greens and blues and white, designed by Sargent Johnson.
Sargent Johnson’s “Sea Forms” mosaic on the deck of the San Francisco Maritime Museum
Sheryl Kaskowitz
WILLIAMS: I want to say four panels? Three and a half panels.
REPORTER: It’s three and a half because the panel on the far left is actually unfinished, with a diagonal line of tile going down it.
WILLIAMS: And that is because the artists walked off the job here, when doing the tile work. And so, that piece was left undone.
REPORTER: In 1939, the federal government gave the city control of the building, and the city promptly leased it to a private restaurant that closed off access to the public. So in protest, Sargent Johnson walked off the job; another artist moved his statues out of the building. Even though the city eventually took the building back, the mosaic remained unfinished.
Moenesha Williams in front of the unfinished panel of Sargent Johnson’s “Sea Forms” mosaic at the San Francisco Maritime Museum
Sheryl Kaskowitz
So, it’s subtle, but this jagged line of tile is a kind of testament to the idea of “the public.”
I've honestly never thought about the meaning of the word "deal" in “the New Deal” before, but looking at this unfinished art makes me realize that that's what it was: an agreement. In this case, the government cared enough about artists to hire them during the Great Depression, and in return, the artists cared enough about public art to defend it.
This story was supported in part by the Living New Deal; KALW retains editorial control. You can listen to other episodes of The Public Works series at kalw.org/the-public-works.
