Rashid Johnson on Middle Age, Being Inspired by Amiri Baraka, and What’s at the Heart of His Guggenheim Retrospective

Artist Rashid Johnson has recently let the light in, renovating the ceilings of his Brooklyn studio to flood the space via skylight. “A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” the first major solo exhibition of Johnson’s work that opened April 18, does something similar, as the Guggenheim spotlights his multidisciplinary practice over the course of his three-decade career.

The exhibition, which features more than 90 works spanning black soap paintings, large-scale indoor and outdoor sculpture, film, and video, is a confrontation of time and remembering. In response, Johnson is trying to remain honest. “At the heart of my project is a real attempt when I’m asked something to try to frame it in the most honest way. To say what I was thinking.”

In many ways, the survey has been a long time coming. The museum has collected Johnson’s work, he is old friends with chief curator Naomi Beckwith, and prior to his time on the museum’s board of trustees from 2016 to 2023, former director Richard Armstrong had envisioned Johnson’s work filling the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda.

“I saw, in Rashid’s work, an early sculptor and video artist; I saw a maturing artist who could make unassuming materials sing; I saw a lifelong student of Black history and culture; I saw a poet and seeking philosopher,” Beckwith detailed in an email to VF. “These minor narratives were the bookmarks we used to get people reacquainted with this brilliant and sensitive artist.”

Throughout Johnson’s evolution, his practice has remained highly referential. Black historic figures are recurrent, like Frederick Douglass and W.E.B Du Bois; Johnson’s origin as a photographer is cornerstone, as this established him as an artist of note with the inclusion of his portraits in “Freestyle,” the Studio Museum in Harlem’s 2001 exhibit wherein chief curator Thelma Golden deemed the included artists “post-Black.” He has since made his feature-length directorial debut with Native Son (2019) to mixed critical reception, and his latest film, Sanguine, is a 35-mm short, probing generational relationships as he, his father, Jimmy, and his son, Julius, all feature.

His sociopolitical criticality has adapted into his present investment in more “soulful” investigations. “Previously I would’ve been intimidated to use ’the soul’ or ’God’ or ’beauty’ and simple form and tone, and to have the confidence, the wherewithal, the recognition that it didn’t come at the expense of my critical voice and my challenge to the rigors of how one goes about making.” Which has now made self-reference more approachable. “There’s a different confidence that comes from allowing your own experience in a different way, soulfully, to impact what it is you’re making.”

As the son of poet and professor of African history Cheryl Johnson-Odim and brother of poet Maya Odim, one wonders, does he write poetry of his own? “I did for many years but not so much anymore,” Johnson recalls, sat back on a sectional under the skylight. “I consider now the artworks that I make, the visual artworks, as poems.”

The studio space mirrors the sprawl in Johnson’s project: Towering ceilings give the large work from his Soul Painting series on one of the walls immense breathing room. Many surfaces are spotted through with ceramic pots and stacks of poetry books, calling to mind the artist’s ongoing series of steel-grid sculptures, started in 2004, a recent iteration of which is a site-specific installation scaffolding the Whitney museum’s plaza. There an illuminated steel-bar grid of shelves straddles the museum’s indoor and outdoor spaces. Its title, New Poetry, like the title of the spring Guggenheim survey, “A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” is lifted from the repertoire of poet, activist, and teacher Amiri Baraka. Baraka, whose presence looms large in Johnson’s oeuvre, performed the work at the New College of California in 1977, the year Johnson was born. (“In the way he reads it there’s definitely a sense of humor, but like all of Baraka’s stuff, there’s this sense of indictment as well.”)

“Artists working in the cultural space today and critical thinkers working in the space today, whether it be around academic space or aesthetic critical spaces: We’re all in the soup and finding ways,” Johnson says, only to be interrupted by a phone call. “This is my buddy Hank Willis Thomas. We talked about this actually.” Such is keeping company with deep thinkers.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Vanity Fair: As a culture, we often conjure the “greats,” their legacy, and that’s the end of the conversation. In some ways you do it too, by bringing in these thinkers and poets. To what extent are you trying to be part of that legacy?

Rashid Johnson: I’m almost always conjuring these spaces with the idea that they are alive. I’m always really interested in the transgressive position of challenging and interrupting and employing. But employing within the framework of contemporary discourse and a present discourse. How do things become prescient and how do they become employable in the now space. I don’t think of Du Bois or Frederick Douglass or Harold Cruse or Amiri Baraka or Angela Davis or Octavia Butler or Toni Morrison as dead voices.

I feel like it’s pyramidal, in the respect that it’s bottom up: that I’m climbing onto this lattice that was built by the antecedent contributors, and then I’m carrying up more material.

We’re all finding ways to continue the tradition of learning from the folks who predated you and then amplifying their ideas while contributing your own. I don’t know what James Weldon Johnson thought about: I can’t speak to that. And I do see the value in taking time to recognize the contributions of others just as contributions, but I’m also deeply invested in the critical unpacking and the malleability and the evolution and the fact that these ideas are alive and that all ideas are alive.

This point in your life is being defined as your midcareer, but maybe to you it’s “I just got started” or “I’m at the end, actually.” Where are you?

I am always in the middle: liminal space, transition, thresholded space. I feel like I am constantly in the middle of something, whether it’s quite literally in the middle of finishing a painting or in the middle of finishing a script and a film. And the post-mediumness of my project has always kept me feeling like I’m a moving target to some degree.

I’m in the middle chronologically, and I think the fact that this—you would imagine it likely would—falls in that space we call middle age is really appropriate. Middle-aged space is inherently a crisis space.

It’s a compounding set of crises. Thematically and critically, it all builds up to making you feel very challenged and forced to account for your actions. And that sense of accountability is actually rewarding. Being forced to look at actions I took in my early 20s and how those actions output as artworks, and then being challenged to not only see them, recognize them as part of my narrative, but to explain them to some degree or to have them explained to me is a really interesting thing. Because I don’t exactly remember all of the specifics of what motivated everything that I’ve ever done. I think if you were to ask anyone, they would have a similarly challenging experience. They said, “Okay, you were 20 and you did this, and you did that, and you did the other thing. Why did you do that?” And you’re like, “Well…”

Amiri Baraka’s words loom large in your work and especially in this exhibition.

Thinking about a crisis state or the idea that in your critical being, there’s a chance for transition, or evolution, or growth: that all leads me to Baraka. In particular, the title for this exhibition, “A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” was born of me employing that particular poem by Baraka in a film that’s included in the exhibition.

The film is titled Sanguine, which is also part of a large installation that happens at the top of the rotunda. I borrow and actually use Baraka’s words and him reading from that particular poem in the film. That poem is an interesting challenge. It’s a challenge to our times, and it feels prescient. He is really trying to hold accountable an educated class of folks and calling into question where their loyalties lie and where their ambitions lie, and questioning their sense of action and their sense of responsibility.

Then for your use, who’s on the other end of that indictment?

It starts with me, to be honest. There are aspects in that poem that I had to ask myself, and consistently I’m asking myself: What are the intentions of these objects? What are the goals of this project? And do my actions live up to my ambitions? The calls coming from within the building. I think one of the really significant transgressions in an artist project is the willingness to self-challenge and the willingness to recognize your limitations, but at the same time, question what is at the center of your project? I don’t have, and I wish I did, but I don’t have solutions in my project.

When people ask me more flat questions, like, what is the intention of this? I’m challenged by it. Sometimes I can kind of conjure an answer. I’ve become less interested in conjuring that answer because it just doesn’t have a solution. There just isn’t a solution. And it’s okay for something to be flimsy in a way and malleable, it’s okay to be in a liminal space. It’s okay to be in transition. It’s okay to be in crisis. And so that brings back Baraka in that idea of transition. I’ve always felt—it’s a strange point of reference—but that I am somehow consistently in a space of crisis and transition, maybe the one Baraka experienced, but that I stay present in that space, that atomic condition of ignition.

So, how is the anxiety these days?

It’s not so much in front of me in the same way that it had been previously, but it’s like a scar where I could see it, and I know it’s there, and sometimes it comes back and it comes back in a way that is scary and frustrating. To your point, at an earlier stage, I think that there was a more significant recognition of it because it was really, really actively, consistently producing obstacles. But you get a little bit older, you learn how to treat and affect these things, and then you sometimes move these things into other spaces. I no longer have the same existential crisis that I had as a younger man because I have a child and I’ve moved my concern from my own crisis to his development. And you think about and see the cycles of politics and the changing of the guard, and you recognize what and how younger voices are contributing to discourse in a different way. And maybe I don’t feel as responsible to be leading the charge vocally like I may have thought at a different stage. So, I just feel like I could be a witness and a present participant.

A step back?

Not so much a step back, but having a different sense of patience and a different willingness to hear and listen. That and just maybe I’m not as smart as I thought I was. That is one of the most rewarding things to come to recognize, is that I have a lot to learn, and I’m here for the contradictions. It’s those spaces in between, again, those liminal spaces that are really fantastic because when you learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable, then you are in the cut. And that’s what I’m trying to learn to do.