Guggenheim Museum Announces Rashid Johnson Survey

Rashid Johnson b. 1977, United States Follow +

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum will present a mid-career survey of work by Rashid Johnson in New York next year.

Born in Chicago in 1977, Johnson blends references to Black experience and art history in paintings, sculptures, photographs, and films.

Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers (18 April 2025–18 January 2026) will feature almost 90 pieces, including works from the photo series ‘The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club’, the black soap and wax ‘Cosmic Slop’ paintings, spray-painted text works, and the more recent ‘Anxious Men’ and ‘Broken Men’ series.

Speaking to Ocula in 2022, Johnson said creating work about anxiety ‘is an opportunity to speak about the wholeness of concern, to think about fear, and personalise these positions. Because often, when we try to describe the conditions of our experience to another, it can be hard to translate.’

Large-scale sculptures will show both inside and outside the museum, and the floor of the rotunda will become a performance space, furnished with a Yamaha piano.

The film Sanguine (2024), which explores intergenerational relationships, will premiere at Hauser & Wirth in Paris on 14 October before showing on the Guggenheim’s top ramp next year. Sanguine includes excerpts from the poem by Amiri Baraka that lends the exhibition its name.

In ‘A Poem for Deep Thinkers’, Barak writes, ‘such intellectuals as we is baby’ should ‘create life as beautiful as we thought it could be’, not settling for a ‘celebration of madness’ that includes war, stabbing, cocaine abuse, and a ‘star-spangled banjo’.

Naomi Beckwith, Guggenheim’s Deputy Director, said, ‘Rashid Johnson is a master at synthesising the key tendencies of 21st century art: the ability to move freely between different modes—painting, video, sculpture, performance—each a refined tool for forging a relationship between his own life history and art history.’

‘Above all, Johnson well understands that the vocation of the artist entails more than looking inwardly, it is also an opportunity to create, quite literally, platforms for the creative expression and self-care of others,’ she said.

Guggenheim anticipates a national tour of the exhibition following its showing in New York, starting with a stop at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. —[O]

Main image: Rashid Johnson, The Broken Five (2019). Ceramic tile, mirror tile, branded red oak flooring, vinyl, spray enamel, oil stick, black soap, and wax. 247 x 397.5 x 5.4 cm. Courtesy © Rashid Johnson, 2024. Photo: Martin Parsekian.