In 1968, Marie Johnson created Woman with Flowers, a contemplative mixed media painting featuring a young black girl grasping two flowers against an urban backdrop. Woman with Flowers is a stellar embodiment of Johnson’s vibrant painting techniques. As a black female artist, Johnson seeks to convey her experience through her work. Her vibrant use of color in Woman with Flowers relays a specific rhythm and spirituality of the Black experience. Drawing inspiration from her family and her life in the Bay Area, Johnson encapsulates a quotidian moment of the black, female experience in Woman with Flowers. Johnson is particularly interested in depicting both abstract and realistic aspects of nature, her personal feelings and relationships with the people who surround her, her spiritual idols, and symbolic elements of both the past and the present. While a number of Johnson’s works differ in style, technique and material, what ties them together is her commitment to channeling and interpreting her own personal perception of the world.

Johnson’s mixed media technique in Woman with Flowers encapsulates the complexity of her identity, and the multi-faceted nature of her experience as a black female artist. The central subject of the painting is a woman wearing a blue dress with a white flower collar that matches her sleeves. Her chin is tilted slightly upwards, giving her an air of confidence and poise. She wears a confident, subtle smile, and clasps a pink and blue flower in her hands. While her eye contact with the viewer is soft, she still manages to hold the viewer’s gaze in pride. Her body posture, striking the viewer in its centrality to the painting, indicates a certain level of personal conviction. The subject possesses a certain ownership of the scene behind her; an urban environment composed of several buildings made of visibly different materials. She stands in front of a multi-level house, perhaps an apartment complex. In each visible window of this building, other various subjects carry out the regular routines of daily life.

During the 1960’s, Johnson became increasingly active in the San Jose chapter of the NAACP where she was invested in providing equal job opportunities to minority students. Her participation in the march on Selma, Alabama had the most profound effect on Johnson’s artistic practice. Johnson explains, “When I came back I felt as though abstract work had to go on hold. So I started painting my world around me.” Considering the way in which the civil rights movement spurred a monumental shift in Johnson’s practice, the urban setting of Woman with Flowers may be a direct reference to the Civil Rights Act of 1968. This Civil Rights Act prohibited the discrimination in the sale, rental and financing of housing. In contrast to the success of this anti-discriminatory housing policy, the black community suffered a deep loss with the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968. The inquisitive expression of the central female subject in Woman of Flowers is justified by the challenges of housing amidst the immense sense of grief and loss of hope experienced by the black community.