A New York Times review describes Buffie Johnson's work as located at the intersection of spiritualism, myth, and symbol, and influenced by the work of Carl Jung. She was included in Peggy Guggenheim's 1943 exhibition "31 Women", which was one of the first to show exclusively female artists. Johnson was a bit of a proto-feminist: A theme across her work is the attempt to represent "divine female power," Born to a wealthy family, she knew and associated with a stable of luminaries across the arts and letters.

 

Her work is in the collections of the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum and the MFA, Boston, the Corcoran, the Baltimore Museum, and the Newark Museum, among others.