One of contemporary art’s most sought-after figures, Rashid Johnson channels his insatiable curiosity for materials into work that probes anxiety, intimacy, and the emotional alchemy of everyday life.

In the mid-1990s, Rashid Johnson was working as a lab technician at a one-hour photo shop while studying art at Columbia College Chicago. One day, while listening to the radio during a printing shift, he heard photographer Roy DeCarava discuss his images of jazz musicians and life in Harlem on NPR’s&nbsp;Fresh Air. The interview opened Johnson’s eyes, he says, to the possibility of occupying a “space between being&nbsp;a practitioner and having a voice that narrates things you make.”
At the time, Johnson, now 49, felt daunted by the many possible paths ahead. “I was interested in picture-making; I was interested in storytelling; and I was interested in painting and sculpting,” he recalls from his Brooklyn studio. But DeCarava’s words affirmed that he didn’t have to choose—he could embrace the “duality of being a maker and a speaker.” “I realized I could launch a more robust investment for art.”
Johnson has gone on to build one of the most closely watched multimedia careers in contemporary art. Collectors and institutions vie for his grid drawings, black-and-white portraits, moving images, planted installations, tile-and-mirror collages, and black-soap paintings, some of which approach seven-figure price tags. His name recognition extends beyond the insular art world, establishing him as a cultural figure of outsized impact.
The influence Johnson wields across a variety of media lends him a distinctive aura and a razor-sharp self-awareness—a kind of star power, if you will. He fears losing his appetite for experimentation more than hitting a plateau. “I would be more challenged by maintaining the same body of work for a decade than floating around different approaches,” he says. Towering in height and refreshingly candid, Johnson reflects on the pitfalls he has navigated and the rewards he has earned with the same easy confidence he brings to discussing what lies ahead. He also speaks to what he sees as society’s “thirst” to “know how others navigate and deal with this big complicated world and find out our roles in it.”
Over the past three decades, Johnson has amassed an impressive body of work and a string of career milestones, from permanent commissions at the Obama Presidential Center and the Doha International Airport to exhibitions at institutions and foundations across the globe. He currently has a solo show at Château La Coste, a sculpture park and winery in Provence.

The Guggenheim museum in New York marked a career high last year with A Poem for Deep Thinkers, a sweeping survey organized by the museum’s deputy director, Naomi Beckwith. Johnson’s restless experimentation unfolded across the museum’s spiraling rotunda, an operatic backdrop for the work of a conceptual artist continually pushing his practice forward. The traveling exhibition has been praised for revealing new dimensions of Johnson’s work, and was recently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

The Windy City, where Johnson was born to a mother who was an African Studies scholar and a father who was an artist and war veteran, first shaped his critical outlook. During his student years, he photographed Black men, many of whom lived on the city’s South Side streets, for his portrait series “Seeing in the Dark.” Those images became the subject of his first gallery show, held locally in 1999. “An artist’s investment would be in the ideas and how they defended them, less to be rewarded or be famous,” Johnson says of his emergence in the city. He adds, “Chicago sequestered me and allowed my development in away that New York might not have.” He has a point. Johnson’s national breakthrough came two years later, when curator Thelma Golden included “Seeing in the Dark” in the Studio Museum in Harlem’s star-making group exhibition, Freestyle. The show also featured then-rising artists Mark Bradford and Julie Mehretu.

Johnson’s New York debut paved the way for performative self-portraits and, by the late 2000s, “Cosmic Slops,” a body of carved abstract paintings made with poured black soap and wax. The past decade has seen him expand into ceramic tile, mirror, and wood reliefs animated by exuberant splashes of color, as well as bronze sculptures that range from bodily forms to domestic objects interspersed with everyday items. Johnson believes some of his most rewarding discoveries have come from taking chances on unpredictable materials. Tile, for example, offers what he calls a “visceral” experience through its “willingness to give resistance.”
Johnson’s materials—whether reflective glass shards or broad strokes of paint—both soothe and confront the viewer. His works often command generous scale, their sweeping spans gently unsettling viewers into a heightened awareness of their own bodies while delivering a visceral reminder of the vulnerability of existence. He is a master at forging an immediate, lasting connection with his audience, one that extends beyond the initial optic encounter. In an age of fleeting glances and an endless hunger for the next visual lure, he combines unlikely materials in compositions of elegant chaos, inviting viewers to arrive at their own interpretations.
The meditative calm of Johnson’s sailboat paintings from 2021 and 2022 contrasts with the dizzying density of “Anxious Men,” his critically and commercially celebrated series, which he expanded into “Anxious Audiences” in 2016. In these works, he repeats pared-down, nearly identical faces with goggled eyes across grid-like compositions. Arrayed like an army, the figures stare out at viewers with expressions of terror, rendered on tiles or etched onto paper. First exhibited in 2015, just as the Black Lives Matter movement was gaining traction, “Anxious Men” took on renewed resonance amid the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd in 2020, as protests against racial injustice swept the country. “I am an anxious man,” Johnson says of the series’ enduring impact. “What the viewer can do is the labor of interpreting why someone like me would be anxious.”

Whether applied to linen or tiles, Johnson’s bold gestures reflect his interest in the “body’s functions towards an object and a topography,” he says. “I like the tangible psychology of art as something like a skin that you can put on.” His fascination with physicality has long propelled his curiosity when it comes to exploring materials, as well as the very process of making objects. Familial bonds have recently emerged as another terrainin this equally corporeal and cerebral journey. Johnson’s new solo exhibition at Hauser &amp; Wirth’s SoHo space features mosaic paintings and a short film starring his 15-year-old son, with whom he shares the same September birthday. (He interpreted a still from the film as a self-portrait for the collector’s cover of this issue.) The prospect of his son’s approaching adulthood has prompted a parental reckoning, as Johnson reflects: “Parents realize somewhere around their child’s teenage years that they did not create a clone, and they begin witnessing an autonomous being with their own baked ideas, concerns, and ambitions.”
Care has long shaped Johnson’s own concerns and ambitions. The living plants that have become a signature element of his sprawling installations, for example, speak to responsibility, patience, and growth. “The responsibility breeds empathy and concern in people obligated to maintain a plant, as well as to those who observe them,” he says. Encountering Johnson’s work invites a collective reckoning that begins with the most personal corners of the mind. “I think, as a whole art audience, we have become exhausted by irreverence and insincerity,” he says. “Let’s bring in vulnerability.”

Rashid Johnson Was Made To Feel

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