"My work expands on the complexity and kind of elastic quality that the black experience is capable of conveying."
One of the most critically acclaimed and influential American artists of his generation, Rashid Johnson (b. 1977, Chicago, Illinois) is known for his artistic practice that moves across media to articulate layered meditations on race, identity, personal history, and the American experience. Johnson came of age in Chicago, and its cultural and intellectual traditions continue to influence and permeate his expansive body of work. He studied photography at Columbia College Chicago and earned his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005, where he was drawn to the language of conceptual art and the critical theory that underpinned it.
Though Johnson’s early practice emerged from photography, he quickly expanded into sculpture, installation, film, painting, and performance—developing an original visual language that weaves together abstraction and symbolism, personal narrative and shared cultural memory. His materials are both evocative and deeply autobiographical: shea butter, black soap, books, vinyl records, plants, mirrored tile, and found objects form an evolving vocabulary that carries resonance within African American life and diasporic identity. In his works, these materials become charged with history, mysticism, and emotional weight.
Johnson has created an oeuvre that speaks to the condition of contemporary life, especially as shaped by the psychological and existential pressures of Black experience in America. His recurring engagement with themes such as anxiety, spirituality, and survival renders his work at once personal and universal. Johnson’s constructions—grids, shelving systems, branded wood panels, and immersive installations—echo minimalist strategies, all while disrupting these materials’ historical neutrality, imbuing them with narrative and cultural specificity.
For Johnson, material is a site of memory and transformation. As he has stated, “The goal is for all of the materials to miscegenate into a new language, with me as its author.” This alchemical approach is especially visible in his large-scale installations and assemblages, which often straddle domestic, archival, and ritualistic space. Through a process of mark-making that includes scoring, branding, engraving, and burning, Johnson brings urgency and physicality to the surfaces of his works—emphasizing their status as records of the past and present.
Over the past two decades, Johnson’s work has taken increasingly introspective turns, addressing states of psychological interiority. In recent bodies of work such as Anxious Men and Untitled Escape Collages, Johnson confronts conditions of mental health, displacement, and longing, extending his investigation into what it means to inhabit a body, a history, a community, or a nation under pressure.
Rashid Johnson lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His art stands as both a mirror and a provocation—poised between the personal and the political. Unfolding across diverse media, Johnson’s practice continues to reshape the possibilities of contemporary art while offering new ways of seeing, knowing, and feeling.