Rashid Johnson

A massive compendium on the multimedia art of Rashid Johnson, tackling themes of Black history, literature, philosophy and material culture Rashid Johnson (born 1977) is renowned for challenging the assumptions often present in collective notions of Blackness. Based in New York, Johnson is among an influential group of American artists whose work employs a wide range of materials and images to explore themes of art history, literature, philosophy, and personal and cultural identity. After beginning his career working primarily in photography, Johnson has expanded into a variety of mediums, including text work, sculptural objects, installation, painting, drawing, collage, film, performance and choreography. Drawing on a dizzying array of historical, cultural, literary and musical references, Johnson ultimately invites audiences to find connections to their own lives. Rashid Johnson: The Hikers presents works from his highly acclaimed shows at the Aspen Art Museum, Museo Tamayo and Hauser & Wirth. This dynamic and unprecedented collection of his work features a conversation between Rashid Johnson and choreographer Claudia Schreier, as well as essays by curators Heidi Zuckerman and Manuela Moscoso.

Rashid Johnson: The Hikers

Claire Gilman

Jeremy Sigler

Universally accessible and employing common visual tropes such as the monochrome and the grid, Johnson's work is also self-referential, making specific allusion to his upbringing in Chicago and the Afro-centric values of his parents. In Rashid Johnson: Anxious Men, the artist creates a site-specific installation in the Drawing Room gallery. The core of the exhibition is a new series of black-soap-and-wax-on-tile portraits that Johnson calls his “anxious men.” Executed by digging into a waxy surface, they enact a kind of drawing through erasure and represent the first time Johnson has worked figuratively outside of photography or film, and on such a small scale. Whereas Johnson’s previous work has taken a more cerebral approach to questions of race and political identity, the drawn portraits confront the viewer with a visceral immediacy. The portraits are set within a multi-sensory environment that includes wallpaper featuring a photograph of the artist’s father from the year Johnson was born, and an audio sound track comprised of Melvin Van Peebles’s “Love, That’s America,” a song that originally appeared in Peebles’s 1970 film Watermelon Manand that was recently pressed into service by the Occupy Wall Street movement. In this way, the exhibition, documented in this volume, creates an immersive space that implicates not only the artist but also the viewer in its interrogation of selfhood and identity.

Rashid Johnson

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