Rashid Johnson (b. 1977, Chicago) is recognized as one of the major voices of his generation, an artist who composes searing meditations on race and class while establishing an organic formal vocabulary that fuses a variety of sculptural and painterly traditions. Though he employs materials drawn from specific autobiographical contexts—including those related to African American intellectual and imaginative life—and though his practice had its beginnings in photography and conceptual art, Johnson is equally interested in testing the ability of abstract visual languages to communicate across cultural boundaries. The visceral experience of art, on formal terms, is therefore considered inseparable from the social matrix that gives rise to it. Johnson’s work is predicated upon moving freely between these two modes. The breadth and generosity of his vision has resulted in a wide range of two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects, installations, videos, and performances.
Johnson was born in Illinois to an academic and scholar mother, Dr. Cheryl Johnson-Odim, and father, Jimmy Johnson, who was an artist but worked in electronics. Naturally, Johnson’s work is built upon conceptual art and historic landmarks, but he makes a point in his work to express empathy for the subject matter and the viewer-that his artwork doesn’t need to be deconstructed through scholarly references or metaphor to be successful.
Johnson’s work reflects the Black experience, and more recently, of escapism and anxiety through art-objects, drawings, music, dance, and film. Overall, Johnson’s focus is on ‘Us’, who we are as a collective, what we’ve done, and where we’re going. As a father to a son, Johnson’s work is concerned with what kind of world his son will inherit and how to explain that world to him.
With that vision in mind, Johnson, along with Julie Mehretu, Adam Pendleton and Ellen Gallagher have also begun another art object, or maybe, a les lieux de mémoire-site of memory. Five years ago, the group of artists purchased Nina Simone’s childhood home in Tryon, N.C., with plans to restore the home and maintain the home as a cultural and historical landmark. The purchase mirror’s Johnson’s idea that art seeps into culture and effects change, slowly. Johnson believes that great artwork doesn’t simply respond to calamity in difficult times but comes out of brewing in the collective consciences and emerging to teach, inspire, or humor audiences again and again. In praxis, by preserving Simone’s home, Johnson provides the opportunity for artists and audiences to engage with the singer and activist’s work and history for generation after generation.
Rashid Johnson was one of six artists commissioned by the Queens Museum, New York, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to create a site-specific, permanent installation for Delta Airlines’s new terminal at the La Guardia Airport in Queens, New York. In 2021, Rashid Johnson presented a major solo exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, as well as large-scale artworks commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera. A major outdoor sculpture by Johnson was recently installed at Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York. Stage, Johnson’s interactive installation and sound work, is open through fall 2021 at MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York. Johnson has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2019); Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2019); Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City (2017), which traveled to the Milwaukee Art Museum (2017); Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2016); and Drawing Center, New York (2015). Notable group exhibitions include Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, New Museum, New York (2021); The Stomach and the Port, Liverpool Biennial, England (2021); Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014); and ILLUMInations, International Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale, Italy (2011). His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. His first feature-length film, an adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was released on HBO in 2019. Johnson lives and works in New York.
As part of TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art 2022, Rashid Johnson will receive the amfAR Award of Excellence for Artistic Contributions to the Fight Against AIDS in recognition of his generous support of amfAR’s programs. Past TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art honorees include renowned artists Yoshitomo Nara, Alex Katz, Dana Schutz, Jonas Wood, Laura Owens, Ellsworth Kelly, Wade Guyton, Luc Tuymans, Richard Phillips, Mark Grotjahn, Christopher Wool, Peter Doig, Jim Hodges, Elizabeth Peyton, Tom Friedman, Cecily Brown, Julian Schnabel, April Gornik, Ed Ruscha, Joel Shapiro, and Robert Rauschenberg.