Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/730395
Rashid Johnson made his name as the youngest participant in "Freestyle," a 2001 show at the Studio Museum in Harlem that put some of today's best-known African-American artists, like Trenton Doyle Hancock and Julie Mehretu, on the map. Although Johnson debuted with three classically composed portrait photographs of a homeless black man he met in his hometown, Chicago, today he is lauded for more conceptual work, expressed in a vast range of media, including painting, sculpture, installation, performance and video. Yet while his materials and his vocabulary are widely variegated, Johnson's concerns have stayed consistent, says Thelma Golden, now the Studio Museum's director and chief curator, who selected him for the show. At the core you always see "a deep engagement with the history of conceptual art," Golden says, "but also the history of black people." And the work always "operates on an emotional level and an intellectual level at once." By now, Johnson, 40, has also shown in galleries, museums and biennials around the world—a major exhibition at Moscow's Garage Museum just closed. And he was recently named to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation's board of trustees, the first artist appointed since Hilla Rebay, the Guggenheim Museum's founding director and curator. Among Johnson's more remarkable traits is his humor and humility—as is immediately clear on a steamy summer day in his Bushwick studio. He prowls nervously around an architectural model in a corner, the maquette for his show at Hauser & Wirth, his first New York gallery exhibition in five years. Looking at the model, he discusses the gallery's intimidating size. "I've never made a maquette this large before," he says, noting its soaring ceilings and famously column-free rooms. "The openness of the space forces you to work as an architect." Then he laughs, adding that the show will likely be about "the success or failure of Rashid Johnson" in that arena, too. Yet failure seems unlikely, for if anything has marked Johnson's career so far, it has been his willingness to embrace new challenges, and his ability to use them all as springboards for artistic growth. So, it's no surprise to see that he is using this show to present three new series, as well as the largest sculptural installation he has ever presented in this country. (The largest anywhere was at the Garage.) The exhibition, which runs through October 22, opens with six works from Anxious Audiences—paintings covered with grids of scrawled, apprehensive faces that grew out of the Anxious Men series Johnson debuted at New York's Drawing Center last fall. "I think of them almost as audiences to the bizarre political theater we've been witnessing," he says, suggesting not only the Presidential race but also the many horrifying deaths that ripped through the news last summer, including the Orlando and Nice massacres, and a string of unarmed black men shot by police. 172 culturedmag.com