Targets recur by means of Rashid Johnson’s rotunda-filling Guggenheim Museum retrospective, an insightful present that actually hits the mark. The primary might be seen outdoors the museum: a big metal sculpture referred to as Black Metal within the Hour of Chaos (2008), its title a reference to a Public Enemy music of the identical identify. Inside, there are work wherein crosshairs are singed into oak floorboards, and there’s a movie wherein a goal seems on a seashore, crudely drawn into the sand as dancers enact yoga positions throughout it.
There are such a lot of targets that, at a sure level, it might probably really feel as if one have been seeing the complete present by means of a sniper’s scope. However who’s the shooter, and who’s being shot at? Johnson leaves these questions unanswered within the work, sculptures, pictures, and movies marshaled right here, a lot of which discover intelligent methods of resisting the inquisitive gaze of their viewers.
That is an artist who, for the previous three many years, has contemplated what it means to look and what it means to be checked out. He did so early on in pictures of homeless Chicagoans, who’re proven closing their eyes, refusing to let their viewers stare again at them. And he has continued to take action in newer mosaic-like work whose glass has been scuffed, marked, and shattered, their tiles now performing as cracked mirrors for his or her viewers.
The purpose of a museum retrospective like this one is often to make clear its topic, permitting a full view of an incredible artist to emerge. But even with the Guggenheim now full of artwork by Johnson, the artist stays an elusive determine. I’d argue that that is truly an excellent factor. It means the exhibition, titled “Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” has carried out justice to an artist who has aspired towards fluidity, movingly freely between mediums and barely making one-liners within the course of.
Johnson has spoken about himself in phrases that recommend as a lot. In a current New Yorker profile, he labeled himself “post-medium,” and chatting with the New York Instances in 2020, he rebutted the notion that his artwork is about anyone factor. “Most of my work has challenged the concept blackness is monolithic,” he stated.
Sarcastically, nevertheless, Johnson’s oeuvre has typically been positioned as a monolith. It’s continuously—and unfairly—diminished to his “Anxious Males” works, work he started making in 2015 that function scribbly faces with gnashing enamel and trembling eyes. That collection and associated ones play nicely with collectors, exhibiting up frequently in business galleries and at artwork festivals, and periodically promoting at public sale within the low tens of millions—hardly something to sneeze at for an artist who is barely 47.
Set up view of “Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” 2025, at Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Picture David Heald/©Solomon R. Guggenheim Basis, New York
Naturally, the Guggenheim present, curated by Naomi Beckwith and Andrea Karnes, with Religion Hunter, consists of fairly a number of of those works. However it additionally showcases many who look completely not like them. The exhibition reclaims Johnson as one thing greater than a market darling, and thank goodness it does.
Not so surprisingly, the massive revelations of this present are Johnson’s movies, which can simply be his least commodifiable works. Threeness (2005), one of many nice early movies on this present, is primarily composed of pictures that includes Johnson staring right into a three-part mirror, shifting his gaze among the many panels between cuts. It’s not at all times apparent whether or not he’s himself or his digital camera, and it turns into even much less clear as soon as he dons a pair of sun shades that protect his eyes. Then, at numerous moments, the picture drops away totally, forsaking a black display that displays again its viewer, who’s left to proceed watching with a mixture of befuddlement and bemusement as she waits Johnson’s return.
Johnson has been undermining viewers’ gazes ever since his begin in Chicago, the place he was born in 1977. His pictures of males on the streets of town’s South Aspect neighborhood, made whereas he was nonetheless a pupil at Columbia Faculty, acted as an early mission assertion. Jonathan’s Palms (1998), one of many oldest works within the Guggenheim exhibition, exhibits a person who places his fingers to his brows, successfully masking his face. Johnson’s digital camera can’t totally see him, and he can’t see the digital camera, both.
Rashid Johnson, Self Portrait laying on Jack Johnson’s Grave, 2006.
©2025 Rashid Johnson/Assortment of Dr. Daniel S. Berger
Already, Johnson was flirting with confusion, tempting viewers into making simple errors with their eyes. Whether or not due to racism or pure human error, some apparently mistook the middle-class artist for his fashions, main Johnson to be taught that there was a “disconnect how I see myself and folks see me,” as he tells Karnes within the Guggenheim catalogue.
The slipperiness of Johnson’s artwork made him a chief contender for a present like “Freestyle,” a now-legendary 2001 exhibition on the Studio Museum in Harlem that featured Johnson’s early pictures. The present was about “artists who have been adamant about not being labeled ‘black’ artists,’” at the same time as they have been additionally “redefining complicated notions of blackness,” as its curator, Thelma Golden, wrote. Johnson emerged from it a star.
The brilliance of works like Jonathan’s Palms could have dimmed for the reason that time of “Freestyle,” however the pictures Johnson created after that present stay each bit as thrilling as they as soon as did. A type of footage, a 2003 self-portrait wherein Johnson poses together with his hair styled à la Frederick Douglass, rhymes properly with an extended custom of artists taking part in dress-up for his or her cameras. Like Yasumasa Morimura and Cindy Sherman, Johnson was exhibiting that id might be worn like a dressing up. His image, printed so giant you could see each pore, feigns the power to painting the reality. Then, as you look into his darkish brown eyes, you begin to marvel simply how a lot of the true Johnson you’re seeing right here.
Simply as he was gaining discover as a photographer, working within the medium he studied within the Artwork Institute of Chicago’s graduate program, he was additionally shaping a follow in sculpture—one thing he continued to hone as soon as he moved to New York in 2005. Many of those works pile excessive the references to artwork historical past, crucial principle, music, and extra, typically in ways in which make his artwork deliberately tough to soak up—nowhere extra so than in Modern Black Male Literature Starter Equipment (2003– ), that includes a gaggle of books stacked on a pallet. All this studying is wrapped so thickly in plastic that it’s not possible to get a glimpse of any of the tomes’ titles.
Rashid Johnson, The Shuttle, 2011.
©2025 Rashid Johnson/Picture Martin Parsekian/Rubell Museum, Miami and Washington, D.C.
Thus ensued a interval of productiveness and an explosion of bizarre, cutting-edge artwork: his “Cosmic Slop” work of the late 2000s, made by melting down black cleaning soap after which letting it dry on wooden panels to type darkish ripples; his items resembling shelving models of the early 2010s, to which Johnson added books, file sleeves, mirrors, and rough-hewn blocks of shea butter. You’ll be able to see your self in almost all of those works, and you’ll see your self, too, of their successors.
Falling Man (2015), a play on Georg Baselitz’s work of inverted folks, options an upside-down determine surrounded by glass tiles, a few of which have been bashed in. Throughout, there are splashes of black cleaning soap, creating crimson splatters paying homage to a criminal offense scene. Footage of police killings of Black males—together with that of Walter Scott that very 12 months—have been extensively seen within the media on the time. Johnson’s portray saliently captures the sense of Black dying gone hyper-visible whereas additionally heading off simple readings on the move: the titular falling man is white, and there’s additionally an outdated image of Johnson’s father that seems completely disconnected from all the things else right here.
The identical 12 months, Johnson stopped ingesting and received sober, an expertise that he has stated “amplified my anxiousness.” The “Anxious Males” work resulted, and so did many different artworks that evince a way of paranoia. Their monumental dimension is typically what makes them efficient. Untitled Anxious Viewers (2019) measures 15 toes large, permitting its rows of scrawled peepers to overwhelm and unnerve. Its grand scale and its black-and-white coloration recall Jackson Pollock’s huge splatter work.
Rashid Johnson, Untitled Anxious Viewers, 2019.
©2025 Rashid Johnson/Picture Martin Parsekian/Assortment of Clara Wu Tsai
However greater is just not at all times higher for Johnson, who has produced so many giant works prior to now decade that his artwork has dulled over time. Sanguine (2025), an set up that occupies a lot of the Guggenheim’s uppermost ramp, strikes Johnson’s artwork into the realm of spectacle, with a grid-like construction stuffed with books, crops, and movies, together with philodendrons and extra which might be suspended from the museum’s roof. Primarily, all of it simply appears to be like costly.
His extra profitable current works are carried out in a extra somber register. Black and Blue (2021), his expressionistic movie about his household’s lockdown-era solitude, is likely one of the only a few nice works about Covid, and Quiet Portray (2025), with a skinny, tangled black line in opposition to a white background, exists on the limits of imaginative and prescient. Each works are serene and reserved.
Set up view of “Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” 2025, at Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Picture David Heald/©Solomon R. Guggenheim Basis, New York
It’s notable that Johnson has continued to color his “Anxious Males” successors in tandem with these calmer works, which seem associated to his bigger curiosity in wellness rituals—what we would name self-care in our current, overly therapized vernacular. Older works on the Guggenheim discover Johnson rubbing shea butter on his physique and spray-painting messages to himself (“RUN,” “FLY AWAY,” and so forth). These rituals appear designed to assist Johnson stay stoic within the face of a lot crucial consideration.
Perhaps that’s why I saved returning to a lesser-known self-portrait on this present, The Reader (2008), wherein Johnson reclines on a deck chair whereas ingesting a whiskey on the rocks. Sporting a gown tied on the waist, he holds a hardcover ebook as much as his face, obscuring it from his digital camera’s lens. He stays blurry—actually, due to how the image is shot, but additionally metaphorically, as a result of Johnson by no means fairly comes into focus. That this exhibition permits him to stay that method is a feat.
