Rashid Johnson is returning to the museum that helped establish his career with an exhibition examining the ideas, relationships and anxieties that have shaped his art. Arriving at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in November, “Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers” follows presentations at New York’s Guggenheim Museum and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
The survey is the largest exhibition yet for Johnson, 49, whose work uses materials including shea butter, houseplants, black soap and wax to investigate Black diasporic life and personal experience. During a recent 24-hour visit from New York, he supervised adjustments to the installation. His priority, he explained, was the exhibition’s impact on visitors.
Johnson grew up in Evanston, where his mother, a Northwestern professor and poet, surrounded him with books, art and intellectual debate. Academics gathered at the kitchen table to discuss subjects ranging from African politics to philosophy. His father offered another kind of education: Johnson remembers his Wicker Park apartment as a workshop where objects were regularly dismantled and examined. Those influences helped shape an approach to art rooted in curiosity and experimentation.
That family history appears in “Home (a poem),” a video filmed in the childhood house where Johnson’s mother still lives. Scenes of relatives reading and talking take a surreal turn when they eat slabs of shea butter. At Columbia College, Johnson’s unconventional instincts drew the attention of painter McArthur Binion, who became an important mentor and recognized a shared commitment to Black avant-garde experimentation.
An early photography series, “Seeing in the Dark,” depicted unhoused Black men Johnson met in Downtown Chicago. Thelma Golden included the photographs in the Studio Museum in Harlem’s influential 2001 exhibition “Freestyle.” Johnson moved to New York in 2005, participated in the Venice Biennale in 2011 and received his first midcareer retrospective at the MCA in 2012. His work now sells for up to $3 million at auction and belongs to permanent collections including those of the Whitney, Guggenheim and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Anxiety became a more explicitly personal subject in “Anxious Men,” introduced at New York’s Drawing Center in 2015. Its faces, made with black soap and wax on ceramic tile, have staring eyes and distressed expressions. Johnson connects that exploration to time spent at the Russian and Turkish baths on Division Street, where the heat helped him become more conscious of his body and find space for meditation.
The bathhouse also influenced “Broken Men,” works combining materials such as mirror fragments, bronze scraps and scratched layers of hot wax. One hangs at the Obama Presidential Center, for which Johnson was among 30 artists selected to create new, site-specific work. Across the Chicago exhibition, changes in materials and mood reflect different stages of his life, according to MCA assistant curator Jack Schneider, who is overseeing its Chicago presentation.
Professional recognition has not resolved Johnson’s personal uncertainties. Aging and raising a teenage son, whom he shares with artist Sheree Hovsepian, have deepened his sense of exposure. “I am more vulnerable because there’s more of my love around,” he said. That feeling runs alongside the practical demands of his career, including the careful placement of photographs, paintings, sculptures, books and other objects in an opening gallery spanning three decades.
