Going to Church

Going to Church belongs to a series of images in which William H. Johnson reflected on his personal experience growing up in racially segregated South Carolina. The image shows a family in an ox cart riding from their modest home on the right side of the composition to the quaint church on the left. Johnson’s self-consciously naive-looking style synthesized the bright, non-naturalistic color of French painter Henri Matisse and the flat patterning of African and African-American textiles.