Working with photography, installation, film, painting, sculpture, or drawing, Rashid Johnson creates artworks that examine the complexities of cultural identity and history in the contemporary world.
Johnson is perhaps most known for his ‘Anxious Men’ series, which began in 2015 as black soap paintings in which abstract portraits of black faces were scratched onto the surface. While the artist first envisioned them as self-portraits, the emotional drive of the paintings reflects the universal experience of anxiety shared by humankind.
Later ‘Anxious Men’ works are also made from ceramic tiles and mirror pieces, forming such mosaics as The Broken Five (2019), which shows a row of five figures delineated in black outlines.
Personal and collective experiences of African-Americans receive careful contemplation in Johnson’s artworks. In the photograph_I Talk White_ (2003), a white substance spells out the title on a mirror, alluding to the preconceived notions of Blackness and racialisation of speech.
The Hikers (2019), a seven-minute film in which two young black men run into each other on a mountain peak, explores the anxiety that comes from unexpected meetings in an isolated space.
Plants are a recurring motif in Johnson’s art. The ‘Escape Collage’ series, begun in 2016, is made up of the artist’s own or borrowed photographic images of exotic places, featuring palm trees and the ocean, and African masks in an allusion to imaginary escapes.
In 2016, Johnson installed a massive labyrinth of tropical plants in the Garage Atrium at the Moscow Museum of Art, titled Within Our Gates, which contained such items as books by W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Frantz Fanon, and cultural objects such as shea butter and African rugs.
