The Collection

Rashid Johnson is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of his generation, creating a multidisciplinary practice that spans sculpture, painting, installation, photography, film, and performance. Johnson draws on materials resonant with African American history and everyday life—such as shea butter, black soap, wax, wood, books, and plants—fusing them with modernist forms to build powerful meditations on identity, race, class, and belonging. His richly symbolic works carry both personal and collective narratives, engaging with African diasporic history while exploring abstraction’s potential to transcend cultural boundaries.

First recognized in Freestyle (2001), curated by Thelma Golden at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Johnson has since developed a formal vocabulary rooted in both conceptual art and visceral materiality. His practice often stages tension between order and chaos, history and mythology, intellectual inquiry and emotional resonance. Through immersive installations and monumental works, Johnson transforms space into sites of reflection and psychological intensity.

His work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions, including A Poem for Deep Thinkers at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2024), which will travel to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Other presentations include Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2019); Aspen Art Museum, CO (2019); Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City (2017); Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2016); and the Drawing Center, New York (2015). Johnson has also participated in landmark group exhibitions such as Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, New Museum, New York (2021); The Forever Now, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014); and the 54th Venice Biennale, International Pavilion (2011).

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; and Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. In addition to his studio practice, Johnson directed his first feature film, Native Son (2019), adapted from Richard Wright’s novel, which premiered at Sundance and was released on HBO.