How to Get a Read on Rashid Johnson 

Once, when I was in my 20s and too much feeling the weight of being a Black man in the United States — someone onto whom most people I encountered would project their assumptions — I had the idea to create a t-shirt that would say, “Your space for projection here.” I feel this phrase could caption much of the work featured in Rashid Johnson’s retrospective exhibition A Poem for Deep Thinkers at the Guggenheim Museum. Particularly for an artist who by no means lacks thoughtfulness, this should not be the case. 

In a conversation with MacArthur Fellow and poet Claudia Rankine, published in his 2023 Phaidon monograph, Johnson demonstrates that he is sensitive to certain logical pitfalls, such as Black people’s too-easy identification with Africanness. He recalls: 

I grew up with a mother who was an African History professor. She wore dashikis and coated our bodies in shea butter. We were also using black soap. She was trying to understand how to define her relationship to Blackness and to Africanness. She wanted to give us these practices as signifiers and tools so we could adopt them and make them ours … I started thinking about the humor and the absurdity in some of that — the idea of one’s ability to apply an Africanness to themselves, but without the rigour. Right? It takes no rigour. It takes no research. It’s just like: buy it and put it on your body. [Laughs]

His discernment is key to this exhibition of 95 works of art that are replete with references to Black identity, its rhetorical construction and historical antecedents, and its visual codes, the dense thicket of signifiers in the forest that is Blackness. 

Johnson gestures to his own intellectual purchase on all of this by including books in many of the installations in the show. The volumes that I find in the piece “Sanguine” (2025), which spans most of the museum’s top level, include The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967) by Harold Cruse, The End of Blackness (2004) by Debra J. Dickerson, and The Dead Lecturer (1964), a book of poetry by LeRoi Jones (who later became Amiri Baraka, and whose poem provides Johnson the show’s title). 

“Sanguine” consists of a steel armature in the nooks of which are nestled books, ceramics, video monitors, grow lights, plants, and shea butter. The piece operates at the intersection of a living space, a library, and a garden, an idea I adore, because it melds spaces that are typically seen as having nothing to do with each other. The wall label describes it as a “‘house’ of creativity and a dynamic container for ideas,” which I don’t understand since no particular house is ever creative. People are, and no structure holds ideas; people do, and sometimes so do books. Yet, this mashup of potent signs pointing to domestic life, studious attention, and some kind of growth doesn’t tell me what Johnson thinks about this life, what serious attention yields, or what specific directions this growth takes him in, aside from a general exploration of Blackness.  

I appreciate that there is something essentially democratic about the idea of being rigorous. It implies that anyone can rise to certain intellectual plateaus by simply putting in the work, by doing the reading. Therefore, I did some myself and came to understand that the central argument made by Cruse in the book nestled in “Sanguine” is that Black Americans will never acquire an equitable place within the larger society until they develop their own hubs of cultural influence and economic power. So is this show supposed to constitute part of this effort? Possibly. But then I find that Dickerson’s central contention in The End of Blackness is, in her own words, that “I’m not saying blackness should go away — it is going away. The concept has lost its cohesion; it’s collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions and limitations.” Dickerson insists that we let go of a fixation with overcoming racism and instead address local issues that can be fixed. 

I am not sure how to square this idea with an exhibition that is deeply beholden to the idea of Blackness. It’s unclear whether these books are meant to signify meaning through their content, or whether their mere presence is meant to indicate serious thought.

There are additional references to reading in photographs such as “The Reader” (2008), which shows the artist in a white robe lying on a chaise lounge, a book with a red cover obscuring his face from the viewer, as if that tome is what we need to see to begin to “see” him. In the almost eight-minute video “Black and Blue” (2021), Johnson can be seen reading at a table while his son works dutifully on a problem and his wife looks on. In the video included in “Sanguine,” Johnson, his father, and his son are all shown in a living room reading, donning African masks, and preparing a meal. This suggests that the knowledge gleaned from books places them in closer proximity to their Africanness, and that this is all necessary sustenance for them. Intellectual engagement with the ways and means of being Black is obviously a deep issue for the artist. There is much reading going on, but I wonder where the apprehended knowledge shows up.

I don’t find it in the aphoristic phrases drawn by hand on mirrors, such as the 2008 spray enamel pieces “Promised Land” and “Run,” and the 2010 “Fly Away.” These are fairly simplistic imperatives and descriptives. The idea of a promised land is embedded in the Black Christian lexicon and fuels some of the resentment for the lack of reparations legitimately due to the Black community of the US. These are powerful words. They link to actions and ideas that shape the experience of the majority of Black people here, even if like me they are immigrants. We have done a lot of running — in athletic competitions, political contests, academic settings to prove our worth. Once, Black people ran from slave catchers for their survival. We have often wished to fly away from unjust circumstances. But it’s not clear how these terms apply to us right now. Johnson is not recontextualizing these forceful phrases enough to evoke a particular, unique meaning, but instead relying on their historical potency to do the work for him. What are we supposed to run from or toward? What does the promised land look like? How will we recognize it?

The installation pieces require more parsing. “Post Prison Writings (2012) is an open, circular, steel armature with a clean, mid-century modern aesthetic and stained red oak flooring, black soap paintings, small mounds of shea butter, and books by Eldridge Cleaver and Frantz Fanon. Taken altogether these items might suggest an emblem, the crest of a house or family. I imagine that Johnson might see these items as a complex visual sign for Blackness. But I find these references far too general, vague, and undetermined. If the suggestion is that Blackness is constituted through a variety of scholarship, signs, and materials that are both personal and communally shared, well, that is something Black arts production has been demonstrating for at least a hundred years. This work reminds me of what an undergraduate English professor once told me about analyzing literature: The subject matter of a story or poem is what the author discusses, but what the author says about the subject constitutes the theme. In other words, despite my grasp of the references, they don’t necessarily cohere into meaning. It feels like the artist is not acting as a guide, but rather as a hype man. The crucial questions the exhibition poses are whether these pieces are actually born of intellectual rigor and, even if they are, whether such cerebral diligence makes for a deep experience.

Looking at the series of Anxious Men paintings, such as “Untitled Anxious Audience” (2019), the simplified faces made of black soap and wax have eyes scratched in an obsessive circular motion and mouths that consist of vertical and horizontal abrasions. These facial features appear deeply fearful, so shaken that they seem to be vibrating. This is a different kind of exactitude, one that’s emotional rather than intellectual, and it’s here that the work takes on greater resonance. Finding this more fulsome meaning may have to do with the work originating in a vulnerable, personal place. Johnson has talked openly about dealing with social anxiety. By plumbing the nature of a self that struggles physically and emotionally, he finds a more convincing connection to viewers. 

The misconception — flogged by academics, mostly art historians, who deal primarily with visual art — is that rigor is the sine qua non of aesthetic production. But I argue that it’s insight, which is more nebulous and intuitive and perhaps harder to identify.

I think of Nick Cave’s 2014 “Untitled,” which consists of a darkly bronzed arm with an outstretched hand affixed to a wall at the shoulder, an overflow of white towels hiding most of the limb. It eloquently evokes one of the essential aspects of racist ideology, which is a reduction of a whole human being to a body (or body part) that exists to serve others. Lorna Simpson’s perceptive 1986 piece “Waterbearer” succinctly conveys an experience shared by many Black women who are asked to give an account only to have their testimony ignored. Marrying the story to a photographic image of a Black woman’s back simultaneously narrows and widens the scope of people the artist identifies as her primary audience. And, most poignantly for me, there is Glenn Ligon’s “Condition Report” (2000), which uses a copy of a conservator’s actual condition report on his artwork to subtly represent the harms that have come to his own body (or another’s) over time. These pieces exist within the same tradition that Johnson works in: conceptual art. But this work comes out of intuitive approaches less anxious about proving their relevance or rigor. 

When Johnson is more embedded in the material, he is more convincing. I’m looking at “The Broken Five” (2019), a haunting portrait of five people, their faces much like the anxious men elsewhere in the exhibition. The dominant tones are stone and beige, but these contrast with the black, reds, blues, and purples that shape the bodies. Broken and reassembled tiles and mirrors with gestural painting and spray enamel compose the figures, all convened to make an image of what life looks like when it is assembled piecemeal, instinctually — which is what most of our lives are like. With the figure on the right, there is a hole in the chest where their heart might be. We are all bits of color and bits of dross trying to make ourselves known. This is evocative of the eternal struggle for humans who are born to die, yet hang on, to make meaning before we go. More of this, please. I don’t understand why much of the show lacks this insight and energy. Therefore, I return to reading to understand Johnson’s choices. 

There is a passage from an essay, “Questions Posed Externally: Rashid Johnson’s Aesthetic Invitations” by Sampada Aranke, published in the same Phaidon monograph mentioned above, which clarifies why he took certain approaches. Johnson talks about encountering Richard Tuttle’s “Tenth Cloth Octagonal” (1967) at the Art Institute of Chicago. He describes the work as “an irregularly shaped piece of cloth affixed to the gallery wall.” His response was visceral: “I was like, ‘What the Fuck is that?’ It just brought all this ire, this frustration, this disappointment. Was I being frozen out? Was I being made fun of? Are there these critical underpinnings, is there this world here that I don’t have access to?”

Aranke concludes that the way Johnson processes this shock is to “make works responding to the invitation it represented.” Rather than rejecting it as lacking meaning, and therefore unworthy of attention, he took it to be a pathway to a certain kind of agency.

This makes some sort of sense: to find a way to be part of the game being played rather than sit on the sidelines, your skills unappreciated. But I find Richard Tuttle’s work to be among the most vapid and tedious art being shown today. It lacks rigor, insight, even care. It is work that celebrates the ability to make benign, indifferent objects that nevertheless attract critical scrutiny and financial investment, because it feels powerful to make this work, and to the viewer it looks like freedom. Rashid Johnson has more to offer than noisily clanging symbols together to indicate his presence. The art scene sees him, and we are ready for the poetry that has true depth. 

Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers continues at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1071 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through January 18, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Naomi Beckwith.