Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers

About the Exhibition

In the more than 20 years since Chicago-born artist Rashid Johnson (b. 1977, Chicago; lives in New York City) presented his first solo exhibition the MCA, he has continued to develop an expansive and renowned body of artwork using art history, philosophy, and Black popular culture as conceptual scaffolding.

With Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers, Johnson returns to the MCA as a prominent artist with numerous national and international projects, awards, and solo exhibitions to his credit. Unchanged is the artist’s remarkable capacity to ask fundamental questions about the fragile human psyche in the face of ineffable historic flows and forces. Keenly attuned to this young century’s central ideas, questions, and aesthetics, Johnson has forged a personal iconography that grapples with the fundamental concerns of our time.

The exhibition presents 70 artworks spanning key moments in Johnson’s career, including his poignant black-and-white photographs of The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club inspired by the ideas of W.E.B. Du Bois; the wall reliefs made of black-soap and wax known as Cosmic Slops; and the Anxious Men and Broken Men series, which evolved in recent years to reflect the chaos and isolation of contemporary life in the United States.

Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers is organized by Naomi Beckwith, Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Andrea Karnes, Chief Curator, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, with additional support from Faith Hunter, Guggenheim Curatorial Assistant. The MCA presentation is curated by Jack Schneider, Assistant Curator.

About the Artist

A Poem for Deep Thinkers is Johnson’s third solo exhibition at the MCA, following an early career show in 2002 as part of the museum’s 12 x 12 series, and his acclaimed mid-career survey A Message to Our Folks in 2012. Johnson has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico (2019); Aspen Art Museum, CO (2019); Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO (2017), which traveled to the Milwaukee Art Museum, WI (2017); Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia (2016); and Drawing Center, New York, NY (2015). His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL.