Rashid Johnson

Chicago, Afrocentrism and a camera

Rashid Johnson was born in Illinois in 1977 to an academic mother and a father who was a Vietnam veteran, an artist by inclination who worked in electronics. His parents separated when he was two and his mother remarried a man of Nigerian descent. The household was steeped in Afrocentrism and celebrated Kwanzaa, and that upbringing sits underneath a practice that has always combined Black history with materials chosen for what they signify.

He studied photography at Columbia College Chicago and took a master's degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where Gregg Bordowitz was among his mentors. He opened his first show as a college junior and had built a reputation for an unusual photographic printing process, using Van Dyke brown and exposure to sunlight, applied with broad brush strokes on a large format camera negative, before he had finished studying.

Freestyle and post black art

The exhibition that launched him was Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001, curated by Thelma Golden, who coined the term post black in relation to it. Johnson was twenty four. The term describes art in which race and racism remain central subjects while the importance of their interaction is deliberately diminished, and it suited a generation raised on hip hop and Black Entertainment Television, addressing audiences who did not need the ground explained to them.

Early work was deliberately provocative. One series placed watermelon seeds, chicken bones, black eyed peas and cotton seeds directly onto photographic paper and exposed them to light through an iron reactive process, turning a set of stereotyped foods into abstraction. Another took its title from the papers that freed people were required to carry to prove their freedom, and arranged abstracted feet, hands and elbows into cubes, church windows and ships. He showed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2002 in its series for new artists, had a solo at the Monique Meloche Gallery in 2003, and in 2005 took the theme of escapism to Indianapolis.

Shea butter, tile and the Anxious series

After his master's he moved to New York and taught at the Pratt Institute. The work opened out into sculpture, installation, video and audio, held together by a private vocabulary of materials: shea butter as a signifier of African identity, black soap, ceramic tile recalling the bathhouse where he took his reading as a student, branded and burned wood, live plants. Smoke and Mirrors at SculptureCenter in 2009 and the invented fraternity of The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club belong to this period.

Recognition came quickly after that. He was in the Venice Biennale in 2011, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago gave him his first major American museum solo, Message to Our Folks, in 2012, and Hauser and Wirth showed him in Zurich in 2013.

The Anxious Men, first shown at the Drawing Center in New York in 2015, are the works most people now recognise: crowded grids of scratched, staring faces, gouged into black soap and wax and later rendered in oil on paper. They are frankly about mental health, a subject he has returned to across the Anxious Audiences and Broken Men series. The Institute for Contemporary Art in Richmond showed him in 2018, Storm King Art Center staged The Crisis in 2021, and the Guggenheim gave him a full survey, A Poem for Deep Thinkers, in 2025.

He directed a film adaptation of Richard Wright's Native Son, which premiered at Sundance and won him an NAACP Image Award for directing.

The market

His work entered the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which also commissioned a two panel mosaic for the Metropolitan Opera's grand tier. Carver, a wax and spray enamel work, made a strong six figure sum in pounds at Bonhams in London in 2022, well past its estimate. The oil on paper Anxious Drawing and the sculpture Little Boat of 2022 catalogued here sit squarely within his central bodies of work.