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A Blacker Mirror
John Haberin New York City
Rashid Johnson
Rashid Johnson finds an African American history as yet unwritten. It could hardly be otherwise, for much of that history is his, going back a generation. He could be questioning a shared identity—or claiming multiple identities for the wealth of African American experience.
Black artists everywhere are reclaiming the past and the nation as their own. Johnson may seem to stand apart. A show of "Smoke and Mirrors" in 2009 cited influences from jazz to Minimalism. They and other traces lay in books, photographs, and other objects on makeshift shelving. Still more clung to a black painting that filled the opposite wall. They did not pretend to cohere, no more than a favorite musician of his, Sun Ra. 
They also looked forlorn, as if the artist were struggling to hold onto his memories. The occasional potted plant, too, made a small side gallery look too large for its own good, but still not large enough for an always overflowing, always inventive body of work. Is that crusty, black expanse a challenge to formalism, black history, or the viewer? I hardly know whether to call it smoke or a mirror. Still, it had me coming back, happily, to find out. Here and in a separate review, I return to four shows over many years to look for clues—starting here with a mammoth 2025 Guggenheim retrospective.
No shortage of heroes
With "The Dead Lecturer" in 2008, only an imaginary history and a huge target connected its parts. And with "Fly Away" in 2016, Johnson sets aside the personal—if only for a moment and if only in his own image. Is he too mature now for anything less, or are things too urgent? He opens with a searing room of black faces, like street art run mad on its way to Chelsea. Soon enough, though, you get even more heartfelt associations as well. That separate review recovers one of its sources at the Drawing Center, in images of his father and Anxious Men.
What then is left for the Guggenheim to fill the entire ramp? Born in 1977, Johnson could speak for African American art in a new millennium, but how? Before the wax, black soap paintings, and shea butter, before the polygonal shelving, one sees him finding his image, a black man's image, in the lives of others. Like Isaac Julien, he posed as Frederick Douglass, neatly dressed and commandingly alive. He played another Johnson as well, Jack Johnson, not sparring but lying on the boxer's grave, a hefty pedestal. The show's title, "A Poem for Deep Thinkers," quotes another hero, Amiri Baraka, the late poet and former LeRoi Jones.
But can a black man afford a hero? With Douglass, it takes only hair parted at center and a grim smile to play the part, while Jack Johnson's idea of public sculpture is unable to get it up. The poet's line comes with more than its share of doubts, like every bit of the younger man's art. He seea blackness as the fate of anxious men, while infusing everything with a sly wit that never lets go. A shelf painting pays tribute to Charles Mingus, the jazz musician, but with an LP called Clown. A spray painting reads Stay Black and Die, but it is alive. Call it graffiti or expressionism's signature, but he is happy to claim both.
Caught between terror and joy? Why choose, and my earlier reviews tease out why. Already, though, one can see all the better how irony itself won out. It did so in slow motion, with video art, like a yoga session on a Persian-accented rug. When Johnson and friends take their exercise to the beach, it seems inflected as much by martial arts as inner peace. When his bookshelves include Bill Cosby on fatherhood, it may reflect his own life stages or Cosby's sad excuse for a role model.
By the show's end, Anxious Men have become Lost Souls. They do so with a shift from wax and moisturizer to broken ceramics and mirror. The damage could extend to his own earlier work as well. Yet the bright tile conveys only lightness, and a triptych may have you thinking of a celebration or a game. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. The media may also allude to Jack Whitten, another handy role model, with a retrospective of his own at MoMA.
Even the most penetrating jokes can wear thin, and Johnson has had plenty of exhibitions without this one. The curators, Naomi Beckwith and Andrea Karnes, break the chronology now and then, and I am not sure why. Yet one last step into the present would be worth it for its scale alone. The potted plants of earlier work have become a hanging garden, descending from the Frank Lloyd Wright skylight. Taken together, the ramp's top level becomes an installation, as Sanguine, with an "embedded" piano. Expect scheduled performances or the one inside your head.
Post-polymath
For an artist so often tagged as post-black, Rashid Johnson has a clear eye on blackness. And anyone who took time with "The Dead Lecturer" can delight in his obsessions. He has plenty from which to choose at that. The show latches onto real blackness, but also a fully imagined past. It claims to describe "the New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club." The Harlem Renaissance was never like this, not even for James Van Der Zee and Winold Reiss—but it could have been.
At least in theory, and Johnson mentions more than one relevant theorist. His artist's statement, like Carol Szymanski, seeks an audience in the language of dating ads: "Must enjoy race mongering, disparate disconnected thoughts, and sunsets (really). Familiarity with the work of Sun Ra, Joseph Beuys, Rosalind Krauss, Richard Pryor, Hans Haacke, Carl Andre, and interest in spelunking the death of identity a plus." Johnson's ad sets high standards, but one may find oneself wanting to meet them. Besides, one has clues to help.
Haacke might have picked out racism with the larger-than-life gun sight that targets the installation itself or anyone who dares to approach it. Beuys might have saved through years of war the soap that Johnson has fashioned into bowls of cornmeal, dubbed The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. Andre might have made the black slabs of wax and soap on the walls, or he might have left them on the floor for ill-behaved visitors to stain their shoes. Krauss might have praised them as knockoffs, and Pryor would have laughed. Sun Ra might have contributed the cape from a galactic spacesuit that hangs nearby—or the background music for club members. Club meetings seem to have neglected socializing and sports for distant galaxies and higher mathematics.
Club members try to look their best in photographs, with names like Thurgood (as in Marshall) and Emmett (as in Till), in the broad-collared suits and sports jackets of a less ironic era. Johnson stakes his claim to history so convincingly that I could almost swear I recognized one dapper, serious-looking fellow as an actual musician. Just one young man, I am guessing the artist, plays all the others. He also manages the centerpiece of a very decentered exhibition. Its black shelves hold more yellow porridge, framed photos, some heavy-duty radio equipment, and an out-of-print encyclopedia of mathematics that intimidated me as a child. Like Sun Ra, the work stands at the nexus of the Great Migration, civil rights, space aliens, and art.
Even a post-black identity needs ancestors, the ancestors that Hank Willis Thomas and Kerry James Marshall are still seeking. Johnson appeared in "Freestyle" at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the 2001 show of emerging artists that popularized the term. He often gives his photographs a vintage patina, and he has expressed wonderment that digital photos will never fade in quite the same way, even as he poses in the guise of black history. He likes the white borders of yearbooks and studio photography, the same borders that framed his nocturnal black hand in "Freestyle." Post-black here means not abandoning or confronting stereotypes, but wearing them lightly. As that classified ad adds, "sense of humor a must."
The ad also identifies his interests as "Godard films and masturbation," presumably at least half mental. Work like this hardly cares whether one calls it eloquent or frustrating, so long as one remembers to listen, to feel, and to smile. Anyone can lose patience with Johnson's spray-painted messages, such as the word RUN on a mirror here. For that matter, anyone can lose patience with Haacke, Krauss, Beuys, and Sun Ra. Sure, his first solo exhibition in New York may or may not add up, but it could add up. It is not about additions so much as aspirations.
That guy
At the start of "Fly Away," four rows of faces stare out from six large paintings. They blend together as caricatures, somewhere between horrified and grinning. They would look at home in a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Johnson works on tiles much like subway walls. Yet he conceives them as individuals. He thinks of every one of them as "that guy," even as he pours on a mix of black soap and wax—and then cuts into it before it dries. This is death by a thousand cuts.
The faces occupy a kind of negative space, the space of what deconstruction might call "under erasure"—and what the black community might know as black invisibility to white eyes. They also endure further omissions, from gaps in the grid here and there without a face. Black lives matter, they say, except when they do not. Painting is serious business, except when it is exuberant and funny. It bears witness, but then so do its viewers. What began as Anxious Men, at the Drawing Center in 2015, has become Anxious Audiences, including you.
Johnson has made a career of riffing on personal associations. He might toss in a space suit out of Sun Ra or a photo of his father, a text in African American literature or a comic novel. It works because he is a consummate riffer—and because his associations speak to others, too. There is no getting around not just street art, race, and politics, but also the grid and monochrome of Minimalism, and who would want to try? Anxious audiences may remember Abstract Expressionism as the "anxious object" for Harold Rosenberg, and those black faces arise from poured paint (or a reasonable substitute) and the artist's gesture. More than ever, they ask to collaborate with others.
Not that Johnson has set his obsessions behind. Besides ceramics, his grids often include shelves and mirrors, as in "Storylines" the year before at the Guggenheim. And here soap, bathroom tiles, and broken mirrors outline the upside-down stick figures of his Fallen Men, as pixilated as an old video game. That photo of his father sneaks back into a medley of black silhouettes, colored tiles, and stock photographs of tropical plants, as Escape Collages. Johnson has used actual house plants before, in the hope of producing something alive. The show's final room recaps it all on a mammoth scale, with shelves of plants, books, heads sculpted in shea butter, and videos going back to his years at the University of Chicago.
Still, he is not just baring his soul, but embracing its place in public art. If a falling man makes you think of the Twin Towers, in an instantly famous photograph, this show opened just in time for the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11. Johnson has often used shea butter, the bright yellow gunk sold on the streets of Harlem and used in Africa for anything from cosmetics to foodstuffs. (His mother is a professor of African history.) Here he lays out a large table of it, fragmented and unsculpted, to expose his materials and his art. That mammoth final installation is an active collaboration with a pianist, Antoine Baldwin, who shows up when he pleases and produces swelling chords out of Keith Jarrett or McCoy Tyner.
The show also has an implicit narrative, from anxiety to escape and back again. Do not, though, expect too tidy an ending. The installation, Antoine's Organ, refuses to wrap up its themes in a neat package. Its books include Native Son but also The End of Blackness, for an artist often associated with "post-black identity" in art, and Sellout, for an artist who has moved to one of Chelsea's largest, whitest, and wealthiest galleries. It even hides the pianist on a high shelf within. If you spot him, bear witness.
Rashid Johnson ran at Nicole Klagsbrun through May 29, 2008, and at Hauser & Wirth through October 22, 2016. "Smoke and Mirrors" ran at SculptureCenter through August 3, 2009. His retrospective ran at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through January 18, 2026. A related review visits his "Anxious Men."