Rashid Johnson
What themes does artist Rashid Johnson’s work explore?
What are some of Rashid Johnson’s signature motifs?
What was Rashid Johnson’s early success in photography?
How did Rashid Johnson’s work change after moving to New York City?
What are some of Rashid Johnson’s notable public commissions?
Rashid Johnson (born September 25, 1977, Evanston, Illinois, U.S.) is an American multimedia artist whose work explores the anxieties of the modern world, intellectual and artistic lineages, and the African American experience. Early in his career Johnson was acclaimed for his portrait photography, which was at times laced with slyly humorous social commentary, but over time his practice expanded to include a range of media, such as abstract drawings, large-scale mosaics, bookshelf sculptures, and feature-length films. A few of his signature motifs refer to the Afrocentric elements of his upbringing, such as shea butter, which comes from the shea tree that grows across the middle of Africa, and black soap, a plant-based cleanser invented by the Yoruba.
Early life
Rashid Johnson was born to Cheryl Johnson (later Cheryl Johnson-Odim), a professor of African history at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois, and Jimmy Johnson, the owner of an electronics and repair shop. Rashid Johnson’s parents divorced when he was young, and he spent his childhood shuttling between his mother’s home in Evanston and his father’s residence in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago. He grew up alongside his elder half-brother, Chaka Patterson, who later became a prominent lawyer in Chicago, and a younger half-sister, Maya Odim, who became a poetry and dance-theory instructor. Johnson later recalled that his parents embraced Afrocentric rituals and attire in his early childhood, and those traditions later proved formative for his artistic practice:
My mother would always have shea butter around, and she wore dashikis [loose-fitting pullover shirts often made from colorful fabric, occasionally with African-inspired prints, and featuring embroidery at the neckline and cuffs]. I was celebrating Kwanzaa, hearing this unfamiliar language, Swahili, and seeing black soap and chew sticks [a tool for cleaning teeth made from the roots, twigs, or stems of an evergreen shrub native to Africa] around the house, things that were about applying an Africanness to one’s self. Then my parents evolved into middle-class black professionals, and I was kind of abandoned in this Afrocentric space they had created. I was forced to negotiate what that period and those objects meant for me.
Early success with the Seeing in the Dark series and other photographs
Johnson was also interested in the photographs his father had taken during the Vietnam War, and as a teenager, he worked as an assistant to a wedding photographer. While studying at Columbia College Chicago, he took photography courses and honed a few early printing processes, such as Vandyke brown, which results in a final print with a rich brown cast. Johnson eventually deployed that process to develop his Seeing in the Dark series, photographs he took of Black men experiencing homelessness in downtown Chicago. Noted for their refined technique and dignified approach to their subjects, the works included Jonathan’s Hands and Michael (both 1998). The Seeing in the Dark series formed the core of Johnson’s first solo show, at age 19, at the Schneider Gallery in Chicago. Three of the pieces were chosen for the seminal “Freestyle” exhibition (2001) at the Studio Museum in Harlem, garnering Johnson national attention.
Johnson also produced photography with a more parodic bent. In 2008 he created a series of black-and-white portraits of himself and other models as members of a fictive “New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club.” The images are situated in a nebulous retro-future, using black-and-white printing, early 20th-century fashions, and dated language in their titles while imagining new, transcendent possibilities of upward mobility for their bourgeois Black subjects. The portrait sitters have improbable employments such as “Professor of Astronomy, Miscegenation, and Critical Theory” and face the camera with stoic, serious gazes.
Shift toward abstraction and Anxious Men series
After graduating from Columbia College in 2000, Johnson studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for a period between the early and mid-aughts. During that time he met Iranian American artist Sheree Hovsepian, whom he married in 2010. They had a son, Julius Johnson, the following year. Meanwhile, the couple had relocated to New York City in the mid-2000s, a move that Rashid Johnson described as representing a fundamental shift in his career. In 2012 he told Art in America, “A lot of my work in Chicago had humor in it. When I moved to New York, honestly, my concerns were just different.…Now I deal with the more formal concerns of abstraction…I’ve gone back to issues around how you make decisions as an artist, as well as the materials and tools that you use to make those decisions.”
The pivot to abstraction and focus on formalism are evident in the variety of experimental projects and unconventional media that Johnson adopted in the late 2000s. In his ongoing Cosmic Slops series (begun in 2007), Johnson melts microcrystalline wax and black soap together and pours the mixture onto a board, creating textured reliefs that also bear a resemblance to paintings. Occasionally he scratches the surface to create works such as Deliver (2013). Building on this series, Johnson created his Anxious Men series, for which he poured a mixture of wax and black soap onto white ceramic tile and then scratched the surface to suggest an agitated face. The works were inspired by media reporting on the Black Lives Matter protests.
After a trip to Spain he began creating mosaics of his Anxious Men, resulting in fractured, Jean-Michel Basquiat-esque portraits, such as Standing Broken Men (2021). Johnson has created several large public commissions based on the mosaic series, including for the Metropolitan Opera in New York City (two mosaics, both titled The Broken Nine [2020 and 2021]); LaGuardia Airport (“The Travelers” Broken Crowd [2022]) in New York City; and Doha International Airport (Village of the Sun [2024]) in Qatar. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Johnson produced more bare-bones abstractions using paper and oil sticks, resulting in his Untitled Anxious Red Drawings, which resemble grids of anxious faces. Eventually he produced similar works in oil, calling them Surrender Paintings.
Other media
Johnson has worked in various other media, including sculpture (such as Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos [2008]), short video (“The Hikers” [2019] and “Sanguine” [2024]), and installations. For the latter, he populates black steel shelving units with live houseplants; grow lamps; small, abstract sculptures made from shea butter; and stacks of books that have influenced him, such as W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903). His installations include Plateaus (2014) and New Poetry (2023). Johnson has also recently begun working in film. In 2019 he directed a modernized adaptation of Richard Wright’s classic novel Native Son for HBO. He also purchased the film rights to Percival Everett’s novel So Much Blue (2017).
Collections and exhibitions
Johnson’s art is in the collections of such institutions as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City; and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. His work has been shown around the globe, including in such solo exhibitions as “Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks” (2012) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and “Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers” (2025) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.