Rashid Johnson Bio
Rashid Johnson is an American artist who produces conceptual post-black art. Johnson first received critical attention when examples of his work were included in the exhibition “Freestyle,” curated by Thelma Golden at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001—when he was 24.
He has studied at Columbia College Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited around the world and he is held in collections of many of the world’s leading art museums.
In addition to photography, which is where Johnson began, he presents audio, video and sculpture art. Johnson is known for both his unusual artistic productions and for his process. He is also known for combining various science with black history so that his materials, which are formally independent, are augmented by their relation to black history. He was a 2012 Hugo Boss Prize finalist.
Rashid Johnson Age
Rashid was born in 1977. He is currently 42 years old.
Rashid Johnson Family/Parents
Johnson was born in Illinois to an academic and scholar mother, Dr. Cheryl Johnson-Odim, and a former Vietnam-war veteran father, Jimmy Johnson, who was an artist but worked in electronics. His parents divorced when he was 2 years old.
His mother remarried a man of Nigerian descent. Johnson said that growing up his family was based in Afrocentrism and that his family celebrated Kwanzaa.
Johnson was raised in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, as well as Evanston, Illinois.
A photography major, he earned a 2000 Bachelor of Fine Arts from Columbia College Chicago and a 2005 Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
While at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, one of his mentors was Gregg Bordowitz.
Rashid Johnson Wife
Johnson is married to artist Sheree Hovsepian. They live in New York City and have one child.
Rashid Johnson Career
Early career
As a college junior, he opened his first show at the Schneider Gallery. By 2000, he had earned a reputation for his unique photo-printing process and his medium and large scale works were priced at up to US$3,000.
In 2000, some of his early black-and-white photography work was described as “spectacularly rich” by The New York Times;the Chicago Sun-Times referred to his 2000 collection of portraits of homeless men “stunning”, and he was noted for a series of large-scale photos of feet that serve as his interpretation of human migration in 2001.
Then, he exhibited in the notable 2001 Freestyle show, a show that is credited with having launched Johnson’s career. The curator of the show, Thelma Golden, is credited with coining the term post-black art in relation to that exhibit, although some suggest the term is attributable to the 1995 book The End of Blackness by Debra Dickerson, who is a favorite of Johnson.
The term post-black now refers to art where race and racism are prominent, but where the importance of the interaction of the two is diminished.
Johnson’s most controversial exhibition was entitled Chickenbones and Watermelon Seeds: The African American Experience as Abstract Art. The subject matter was a series of stereotypical African-American food culture items such as watermelon seeds, black-eyed peas, chicken bones, and cotton seeds placed directly onto photographic paper and exposed to light using an iron-reactive process.
In 2002, he exhibited at the Sunrise Museum in Charleston, West Virginia. The exhibit, entitled Manumission Papers, was named for the papers that freed slaves were required to keep to prove their freedom. The exhibition was described as being as much a cultural commentary as an imagery display, and it related to the previous “Chickenbones” exhibit.
He geometrically arranged abstractions of feet, hands, and elbows in shapes such as cubes, church windows, and ships. This was considered as a study in racial identity because the body parts were not identifiable. Also in 2002, presenting his photographic work using chicken bones, Johnson exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, as part of the UBS 12 x 12: New Artists, New Work series.
In 2002 he exhibited his homeless men in the Diggs Gallery of Winston-Salem State University. The exhibit was entitled Seeing in the Dark and used partially illuminated subjects against deep black backgrounds.
He also exhibited his homeless men work, including George (1999), in Atlanta, Georgia as part of the National Black Arts Festival at City Gallery East in July and August 2002.
George was part of the Corcoran Gallery of Art November 2004 – January 2005 Common Ground: Discovering Community in 150 Years of Art, Selections From the Collection of Julia J. Norrell exhibition. George and the Common Ground exhibition appeared in several other places including the North Carolina Museum of Art in 2006.
He took part in the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs Artist Open Studio Program rotation in the Chicago Landmark/National Register of Historic Places Page Brothers Building during the summer of 2003 with a three-week exhibition. He explored the “historical and contemporary nature of photography”.
At that time, he was represented by George N’Namdi, who owned G.R. N’Namdi, the oldest African-American-owned, exhibiting commercial gallery in the country.
In conjunction with the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Rashid Johnson exhibited The Evolution of the Negro Political Costume in December 2004. He presented replicas of three outfits worn by African-American politicians.
He included a late 1960s dashiki worn by Jesse Jackson, a 1980s running suit worn by Al Sharpton in the ’80s and a business suit worn by the United States Senator-elect Barack Obama. The presentation, which invited inspection, was as likely to evoke a humorous response to the Jackson dashiki as well as critical commentary about the presentation of political attire.
Johnson explored the theme of escapism at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art in a show entitled The Production of Escapism: A Solo Project by Rashid Johnson. He addressed distraction and relief from reality through art and fantasy. Johnson used photos, video and site-specific installation to study escapist tendencies through often with a sense of humor that bordered on the absurd.
Post-graduate career
Top: The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club (Emmett), unknown; Bottom: The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club (Thurgood), 2008
During the summer of 2005, he took part in a Chicago Cultural Center artist exchange program exhibition featuring five emerging Chicago contemporary artists and five from Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Half of the ten were women. As part of the Crossings exhibition, almost all artists had their first chance to exhibit in the country of the others.
In this forum, Chicago Tribune art critic Alan G. Artner said Johnson’s audio selection imposed his artistry on all the other exhibits since he chose a rap song combined with a blunt video. Artner became a Johnson detractor in 2005 when Johnson had this and another simultaneous exhibit appearing in Chicago.
He described Johnson’s exploration of the politics of race as “sloganeering or cute self-advertising” in his two-dimensional works, and his political three-dimensional installations as “glib and superficial” representations. He classified Johnson’s work as more suitable for the audience seeking nothing more than American pop culture.
The following year, in 2006, Artner derided Johnson’s short video contribution to the Art Institute of Chicago’s Fool’s Paradise exhibition as a “conflation of gospel singing with beatboxing … that says nothing worth saying about race.”Other Chicago critics describe Johnson’s subsequent work as relatively hip.
In an ensemble 2006 showing entitled Scarecrow, Johnson exhibited a life-sized photographic nude self-portrait that was supposed to be menacing and abrasive, but that was perceived as interesting and amusing. His Summer 2007 “Stay Black and Die” work in The Color Line exhibition at the Jack Shainman Gallery left one art critic from The New York Times wondering whether he was viewing a warning or exhortation.
However, at the same time, he participated in the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art’s For Love of the Game: Race and Sport in America exhibition that seemed to clearly address manners in which questions about race have been asked and answered on American sports fields of play.
In 2006, Rashid Johnson’s first project in Germany together with Michael Langlois and Robert Davis took place at Markus Winter Gallery, Berlin.
In Dark Matters, a 2007 exhibition at the James Harris Gallery in Seattle, Washington, Johnson is said to mimic Édouard Manet’s Olympia in a work called White Girls and Sam Gilliam and Richard Tuttle in his skyspace backdrops that are perceived as sweeping perfection.
As a post-black artist, his mixed-media work, such as his Spring 2008 exhibition The Dead Lecturer, plays on race while diminishing its significance by playing with contradictions, coded references, and allusions. The exhibit was described as “a fictional secret society of African-American intellectuals, a cross between Mensa and the Masons” that was a challenge to either condemn or endorse.
Despite Artner’s generally negative reviews of Johnson in earlier years, Johnson was near the top of Gartner’s list of exhibitions that he wanted to see in late 2008. Artner promptly reviewed Johnson’s simultaneous September 2008 showings in Chicago.
He claimed that The New Escapist Promised Land Garden and Recreation Center did not come across as either a land garden or recreation center due to the in part because of Johnson’s overwhelming presence and in part because of the long, narrow, cramped venue. He saw too much of the artist in his own work such as Bruce Conner-like paintings and Johnson’s photographic impersonation of tennis champion Jimmy Connors.
He perceives the nostalgia as somewhat autobiographical and possibly fictionalized. He perceived part of the work as graffiti and felt the work was unchallenging.
Artner described Cosmic Slops, which featured 11 paintings of black soap and wax, plus one simulacrum of a Constructivist canvas made of an animal pelt with glittery ribbons, as descendants of the century of history of monochromatic abstractions that discards by titling his work as representations of the heavens.
Artner feels these sculptural waxes are inferior to encaustic paintings in terms of artistic quality despite their three-dimensionality. In 2008 he continued to view Johnson less seriously as an artist but felt his work had the attitude. However, some experts spoke highly of Johnson’s work in the same newspaper during its run.
Reviewers in Time Out Chicago spoke of how he transformed a “space associated with white privilege into a sanctuary for black traditions,” although they note the exhibition seems uncoordinated.
Johnson’s work stood out from the 200-piece 30 Americans at the Rubell Family Collection to be singularly mentioned in The Miami Herald. His work was described as a fusion of “portraits, sculptures, and photography bathed in the color black … [that] represents a fictional secret society of African-American intellectuals”. Johnson described his work as a demonstration of the complexity of the black experience.
Rashid Johnson Native Son
Native Son is a 2019 American drama film, directed by Rashid Johnson, from a screenplay by Suzan-Lori Parks. It is based on the novel of the same name by Richard Wright. It stars Ashton Sanders, Margaret Qualley, Nick Robinson, KiKi Layne, Bill Camp, and Sanaa Lathan.
It had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 24, 2019. It was released on April 6, 2019, by HBO Films.
Rashid Johnson Studio
Follow the link below to get his Studio; https://www.culturedmag.com/studio-rashid-johnson/
Rashid Johnson Provocations
Provocations: Rashid Johnson and Hedges, Edges, Dirt Explore Nativism, and Expressions of Power
Provocations: Rashid Johnson
To launch the ICA’s annual commission series Provocations, Rashid Johnson has created “Monument,” a large-scale work that responds to the soaring expanse of the ICA’s top-floor space. Johnson’s pyramid-like tower is activated by a weekly performance by musicians, poets, DJ’s, yogis, and others.
Continuing motifs from recent projects, Johnson has filled the steel structure with a selection of plants, shea butter sculptures, books, textiles, and video. “Monument” is his first project designed to spark collaboration with other artists and his first major solo project in the American South.
Rashid Johnson Interview
How did the opportunity arise to direct Native Son?
It’s a long and short story. It’s a book that I had been really interested in for a really long time. It actually started with an interview that I was doing with an art writer named Alice Thompson, about 12 years ago. She asked me what I wanted to do next. And I said I wanted to direct a contemporary telling of Richard Wright’s Native Son.
She wrote that in ArtForum. Several years later, she went off to [the agency] UTA. She was there for a short period of time—sorry, I’m telling you kind of the whole story.
No, no, I want to hear the whole story.
So she was in UTA’s art division and she called me and said: “Do you still want to direct Native Son?” And I said I do. And she said, “Come in for a meeting. I have some folks here that would be interested in talking to you.” So I went in and talked to some really interesting and thoughtful folks, they asked me about finding a producer, about finding writers, etc.
I threw out some ideas: I like the idea of Suzan-Lori Parks doing an adaptation, I like young producers who would give me agency an opportunity to do it the way I want it to do it, etc.
And then they came back with two young guys from a production company called Bow and Arrow, who was really enthusiastic about the project and were familiar with my artwork, and they put me in a room with Suzan-Lori Parks.
Suzan-Lori signed on and was really enthusiastic about the project, the Bow and Arrow guys—small turnkey production company—committed to making the film, and honestly, we went from there.
Suzan-Lori Parks is a legend!
She is.
What was it like when you and she came together, and how did you conceptualize a 21st-century undertaking [of this book]?
It was really eye-opening and humbling to meet her for the first time. I had seen Topdog, it was a gift of a friend when I was in my early twenties. I remember just being blown away and thinking to myself, “This is amazing!” So she’d always been on my mind. I was always like, “If there’s someone that could do it, it would be Suzan-Lori Parks.”
I sat down with her, and I was quite prepared for some resistance, for a couple of reasons: one, I’m a first-time director, I’m an artist-turned-director; and two, it’s a quite complicated story that has its own rich and difficult history.
So my preparation was thorough, and I put together all of my critical concerns and some critical and philosophical debates that I thought we were probably going to have around the idea of adapting this, and she cut me off at some point, and said, “I get all of these kinds of existential and philosophical concerns that you have, but the reality is: we have to tell a story.”
Her pragmatism and her understanding of what it actually takes to adopt an artwork like Native Son, something that has such a canonized history, all came to a head for me in that conversation. And her experience with it, having done an adaptation of Their Eyes Were Watching God, a Zora Neale Hurston piece—she’s navigated really interesting and complicated canonical texts in the past and in her own practice as a playwright.
We then started breaking down what it would feel like and what our intentions were, and updating this story and bringing it to an audience in 2019.
What was your relationship with Native Son like growing up and how did that influence your directorial approach?
It was an interesting relationship, in that my mother introduced the book to me with the caveat that she didn’t like Bigger Thomas. And my mother really had an influence on me as a thinker, she’s an academic who taught at a university in the African Studies Department and wrote about post-colonial feminist theory, as well as other subject matters.
Receiving a book and then having that caveat, it really engaged me in an interesting loop—I was like, “What is it about this story and this particular character that she finds to be challenging?” So, like any good boy in post-Freudian exploration, it kept in my craw, I just kept thinking about it, after reading and digesting it for myself.
I kept thinking about Bigger’s sphere, I kept thinking about the issue around masculinity and expectation. Bigger was the first protagonist, and in particular, black protagonist, who I had ever been exposed to who explored his own psychological space in any sort of rigorous way. And he admitted his fears and flaws. I was just very taken by that, and I continue to be taken by that.
Going into this production, did you have any fears of your own about directing a feature film for the first time? And how did you work to overcome them?
Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I think in some ways I was too stupid to be scared, and in other ways, I would wake up very scared. [laughs] There was so much that I didn’t know about the process and the logistics of committing to a feature-length film and responsibility so that sometimes scared me.
And other times, because I’ve had had success in another world and I do have some experience delegating and I have worked with actors in a different kind of capacity, and I do really feel an attachment and understanding of the story and my intentions and concerns and how to tell it, that my ownership and anticipation kept me afloat in the process.
While creating this film, did you find any kind of parallels in your directing and your artistic process?
Yeah, I think that there are a few parallels. One of the things in my artistic practice—and I was talking to a friend about this yesterday—that is really consistent is that when something is not working, I’m really quick and capable of abandoning it. That was really helpful in the process of making the film as well.
When you can find something that’s not working and cut off your losses, you can dig into what is working and making sure that we’re getting into the nitty-gritty and distilling the ideas and concerns in the process of making a film, just like making an artwork, and to really press in the important bits. So, yeah, there’s quite a bit of parallel. In other respects, there are things that don’t correlate at all.
What are those things?
The collaborative aspect. There’s quite a bit of collaboration in an artist studio with the folks that you work with, if that’s even how your practice functions, if it’s a gallery, there’s conversation, discourse with other artists who you invite over to the studio that can help you critically diagnose what’s happening in the work and may have their work involved in the result. The agency that the cooks have in the kitchen of a film is very different.
The level of expertise that someone maybe has, that you don’t have on a subject, is really humbling and interesting to navigate. It’s being aware of pulling people’s skills and talents and familiarity with the medium and making sure that you don’t allow that to break your own confidence.
Rashid Johnson Net Worth
His net worth is still under review.