Rashid Johnson

Rashid Johnson, born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1977, is an American artist and filmmaker who lives and works in New York. His multidisciplinary practice examines personal and collective identity, African American intellectual and cultural histories, materiality, literature and philosophy. After receiving a BA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago, he completed an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005. Johnson emerged internationally in the early 2000s and became closely associated with debates surrounding "post-black" art, although his evolving practice extends beyond this critical category. Johnson first received widespread critical attention at the age of 24, when his photographs were included in Freestyle, the landmark 2001 exhibition curated by Thelma Golden at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2012, he received the High Museum of Art’s David C. Driskell Prize, which honours contributions to African American art and art history. His practice encompasses photography, sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, installation and filmmaking, combining personal biography with references to African American history, Afrocentrism, literature, music and popular culture. Materials play a central conceptual and sensory role in Johnson’s work. Shea butter and African black soap—substances associated with his childhood and with Afrocentric communities—appear alongside wax, ceramic tiles, mirrors, wood, steel, plants, books, vinyl records, VHS tapes and CB radios. Through these materials, Johnson explores race, memory, anxiety, aspiration, spirituality and the construction of cultural identity. His references range from the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois to the music and cosmic philosophy of Sun Ra, bringing intellectual history into dialogue with domestic and everyday experience. Johnson has developed a distinctive visual language through series including his "Anxious Men" and "Bruise Paintings." Characterised by repeated, roughly drawn faces and forceful gestural marks, these works explore personal and collective anxiety, psychological vulnerability, racial violence and wider forms of social instability. The "Bruise Paintings," begun in 2021, expanded this vocabulary through dense fields of colour, layered marks and abstracted faces. His practice also includes monumental "shelf" sculptures composed of gridded steel structures containing plants, books, ceramics, shea-butter sculptures, monitors, radios and vinyl records. Some function as inhabited or activated environments, occasionally incorporating live music and systems for sustaining their plants. By bringing culturally resonant objects into shifting constellations, these works address the "politics of the archive" and the relationships among individual identity, collective memory and inherited historical narratives. Johnson has exhibited extensively at major institutions worldwide. His solo exhibitions include presentations at the Aspen Art Museum, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City and GAMeC in Bergamo. In 2025, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York presented A Poem for Deep Thinkers, a major survey spanning approximately 25 years of his practice. His work is held in prominent public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate and the Art Institute of Chicago. Johnson’s work connects abstract and conceptual forms with social, cultural and psychological enquiry. Rather than presenting the Black experience as a single or fixed identity, his practice examines its complexity through questions of vulnerability, humour, anxiety, pleasure, history and self-determination.