Artist Rashid Johnson has fame, fortune and the perfect trench.
It’s a little past 2 p.m. on a recent fall afternoon when Rashid Johnson emerges from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, looking remarkably sanguine for a man only halfway through a whirlwind day.
Johnson is in town from New York City for just 24 hours and has already made three essential hometown stops: La Pasadita for a steak taco; the old Division Street bathhouse, where, as a young man, he spent hours contemplating his place in the world; and, a visit to his new nephew, who is just a few weeks old.
The day’s final task, however, is still very much underway inside the museum's fourth-floor galleries: supervising the installation of “Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” his midcareer survey that arrives in Chicago after opening at New York’s Guggenheim Museum and traveling to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
“It’s a game of inches,” says Johnson, describing the many tiny tweaks he’s spent the morning making to the exhibit design. “I’m not really interested in this exhibition being tasteful. I’m interested in it being impactful.”
The son of an intellectual and a ‘tinkerer’
At 49, Johnson is one of the biggest names in contemporary American art. Since emerging on the New York art scene in the early aughts, the Chicago area native has built a career using unconventional materials — shea butter, houseplants — to explore the complexities of Black diasporic life. In his “Cosmic Slop” paintings, for example, Johnson melts black soap and wax to create textured, almost topographical abstractions on canvas.
Johnson’s rise has been nothing short of sensational. His art now sells for as much as $3 million at auction, and the Whitney, the Guggenheim and the LA County Museum of Contemporary Art are among the many museums that have acquired his work for their permanent collections.
Johnson also counts LeBron James and Jay-Z among his collectors, and President Barack Obama is a fan, too. Johnson was among the 30 artists tapped to make new, site-specific work for the new Obama Presidential Center on the city’s South Side.
This month, the artist returns to his hometown, and to the museum that helped launch his career, with “A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” his largest show to date.
“Rashid’s work remixes all these references, visual cues, codes and materials,” says Naomi Beckwith, a Chicago native and MCA alum, who is now the Guggenheim's chief curator and one of the exhibition’s organizing curators. “And he takes those references and makes work about affect, about personal feelings, and his desire to look for solace, peace, and home. His search for safety.”
Johnson credits much of his insatiable, omnivorous spirit to his mother, a Northwestern professor and poet. Growing up in Evanston, Johnson was immersed in intellectualism. Johnson’s mother, a scholar of postcolonial and feminist thought, welcomed a revolving door of academics who would debate African politics, nationalism, philosophy around the family kitchen table.
The house itself was dynamic, too. Johnson describes a vibrant space filled with African sculptures, tapestries, and plants, and a basement library packed with books by the likes of Richard Wright and James Baldwin. “I just grew up surrounded by ideas,” Johnson reflects, “by curiosity.”
That domestic world comes alive in “Home (a poem),” a video Johnson filmed in the childhood home where his mother still lives. In it, Johnson and his family sit together reading in the rooms of his childhood, and chatting at the kitchen table. But the ordinary slips into the surreal when they begin to devour slabs of shea butter at that same table.
If Johnson’s mother steeped him in a world of ideas, it was his father who taught him to work with his hands. “He was a tinkerer,” recalls Johnson, who toggled between his parents’ two homes after they split. Johnson describes his father’s Wicker Park apartment as a workshop. “He was always pulling things apart, trying to figure something out.”
Johnson was far less enthusiastic about school art class. “I was not good at painting and drawing,” recalls the artist. “And I did not care to perfectly render a bowl of fruit. That’s not the way I want to express myself.”
Instead, Johnson wanted to break things apart, turn them upside down and carve into them. That approach wasn't exactly rewarded at his Evanston schools. “My seventh-grade art teacher wasn't, like, look at this budding conceptual artist,” laughs Johnson. “I know that I'm an artist because I make art, and nobody ever told me to do it. I need to do it. I fought to be here. I'm here on f—-- purpose."
When Johnson enrolled at Columbia College, however, his disregard for convention was precisely what caught the eye of artist McArthur Binion. An abstract painter whose career recently took off after decades of working in relative obscurity, Binion would become one of Johnson's most important mentors. Binion saw what he called an “educated rawness” in 19-year-old Johnson.
Binion had always admired artists who didn't fit neatly into conventional art education, and he recognized in Johnson a kindred spirit, someone working within a tradition of Black avant-garde experimentation. "We were like two outlaws," says Binion. “He was doing his own thing.”
Deep personal explorations of anxiety
Johnson’s first photo series, “Seeing in the Dark,” shows that unconventional spirit. Made while he was an undergraduate, the series portrays unhoused Black men he encountered in Downtown Chicago.
The images made an impression on Thelma Golden, then deputy director for exhibitions and programs at the Studio Museum in Harlem. She included them in “Freestyle,” her landmark 2001 exhibition that introduced a new generation of Black artists, including Mark Bradford, Sanford Biggers, Julie Mehretu and Johnson. After that, Johnson, who moved to New York in 2005, started showing and selling work at a steady clip, including the Venice Biennale in 2011 and his first mid-career retrospective at the MCA in 2012.
In 2015, Johnson premiered a series titled “Anxious Men” at the Drawing Center in New York City. The portraits, rendered in black soap and wax on ceramic tile, feature nightmarish, inchoate faces with wide, staring eyes that convey both alarm and anguish. The series marked a notable shift in Johnson’s work, toward a deeply personal exploration of anxiety. That fascination, Johnson says, has roots in the hours he spent as a young man at the Russian and Turkish Baths on Division Street.
"I’ve always been a very cerebral person," Johnson says, "and I have to actually do things to make myself aware that I have a body."
The sweltering heat of the sauna, where Johnson spent hours on end wearing little more than a towel, was a good setting for that. And what began as a physical experience also became a deeply spiritual one. Johnson grew up without religion, or any ritual of worship — ”I didn’t even know how to pray,” he says — and the bathhouse was the first place he found sanctuary.
”It became a place where I could meditate or find space for contemplation,” adds Johnson. “It opened a window to a kind of thinking that I hadn’t had access to previously.”
“Anxious Men” is a series of portraits, rendered in black soap and wax on ceramic tile, that feature nightmarish, inchoate faces with wide, staring eyes that convey both alarm and anguish.
Rashid Johnson, Untitled Anxious Men, 2015. White ceramic tile, black soap, and wax; 47 × 34 1/4 × 2 in. (119.4 × 87 × 5.1 cm). Private collection. © Rashid Johnson. Photo: Martin Parsekian.
“Broken Men” is another series inspired by Johnson’s sauna fixation. Hovering somewhere between painting and mosaic, each piece incorporates an unusual mix of materials such as mirror shards, scraps of bronze, and layers of hot wax that Johnson scratches and scars. The work, one of which hangs at the Obama Center, explodes with frenetic energy, as though the artist is in a perennial cage match with his own restless anxieties.
That sense of agita animates much of “A Poem for Deep Thinkers.” The show can, at times, feel claustrophobic and cacophonous. At others, however, the mood is more reflective.
“It’s almost like you’re seeing work made by several different artists,” says Jack Schneider, an assistant curator at the MCA who is overseeing the Chicago iteration of the exhibition. “It’s like several different Rashids, just at different points in his life.”
Johnson’s dexterity, says Binion, stands among Johnson’s greatest strengths. “Rashid has a quality of talent of reinventing himself,” he says, “and I think that’s important.”
The exhibit should feel like “the story of a life,” reflects Johnson. And a life, he adds, “looks crazy. If it looked easy to define, then it probably wouldn’t be that interesting.”
“It’s almost like you’re seeing work made by several different artists,” says Jack Schneider, an assistant curator at the MCA who is overseeing the Chicago iteration of Johnson’s exhibition.
Rashid Johnson, Glass Jaw, 2011. Mirrored tile, black soap, wax, books, shea butter, vinyl album cover, CB radio, oyster shells, and paint; 88 1/2 × 118 1/2 × 12 in. (224.8 × 301 × 30.5 cm). Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Gift of Mary and Earle Ludgin by exchange, 2012.2. © Rashid Johnson. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.
Fame, fortune and the perfect trench coat
It’s rather hard to reconcile those visceral vulnerabilities with Johnson himself, an elegantly dressed 6’3” man who exudes calm and self-assurance. After all, Johnson is an art market darling, represented by Hauser & Wirth and David Kordansky.
He was recently named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in art, and his dreamy real estate portfolio — Gramercy Park, Menorca, the Hamptons — has filled the pages of The New York Times on more than one occasion. (Actress Lake Bell also recently hard-launched her relationship with Johnson on social media.)
But fame, fortune, and a perfect trench coat, Johnson insists, are no panacea. “Life isn’t cured by success,” he reflects. “I’m still thinking through my successes and failures as a man.”
The exhibition’s opening salon, will be a densely packed assemblage of photographs, paintings, sculptures, books and other objects spanning three decades of work.
Rashid Johnson, The Reader, 2008. Lambda print; 28 3/4 × 40 in. (73 × 101.1 cm). Courtesy of Dr. Kenneth Montague | The Wedge Collection, Toronto and Monique Meloche Gallery. © Rashid Johnson.
Getting older also reveals one’s own fragility and fallibility. “Your body is less resilient,” says Johnson. “You get closer to ages where people have heart attacks and you’re like, yeah, that makes sense.” Johnson pauses. “I can’t believe I made work that I thought was vulnerable in my 20s. I was like a brick s—house back then.”
And then there’s the constant undercurrent of worry that comes with parenthood. As the father of a teenage son, whom he shares with his ex-partner, artist Sheree Hovsepian, Johnson feels more exposed than ever. “I am more vulnerable because there’s more of my love around,” he says. “You have so much more to care about than just yourself. Nothing makes you more vulnerable than that.”
Back at the MCA, Johnson’s brief window in Chicago is closing. He’ll soon head to the airport and return to New York. He hasn’t quite nailed down the exhibition’s opening salon, a densely packed assemblage of photographs, paintings, sculptures, books and other objects spanning three decades of work.
Over the next couple hours, Johnson will consider, and reconsider, the layout several more times. Even the smallest adjustments can change how a visitor encounters his art, and Johnson is determined to get it right. When finished, the space should feel like a portal into an artist's singular brain.
So how exactly will Johnson know when he’s done? "You know when you’re done because you don’t have any more time," retorts Johnson. "It’s just the clock."
The clock is just one of the many practical demands of being an artist. There are also collectors, sales, and the constant work of making and showing art. Johnson has become remarkably adept at navigating them all. It’s what he calls the "jobbiness of the job."
Johnson has another answer, too. “Asking that question is really like asking, Why are you an artist?” he adds. “The answer is because I know when I’m finished.”
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