Rashid Johnson
By Michael H. Miller
Photographed by Douglas Adesko
Styled by Luigi Tadini
Rashid Johnson's first major exhibition was a group show at Harlem's Studio Museum called "Freestyle." The 2001 exhibition focused on young black artists given the stylistic label "post-black." Johnson, who grew up in the Chicago suburbs, was recently out of school and still finding his method; he showed understated photographs of down and out men around his hometown.
Since then, he's honed a unique style with references as varied as the films of Melvin Van Peebles to the poetry of LeRoi Jones. He recently won the High Museum's prestigious Driskell Prize, has a retrospective this month at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and joined one of the most powerful galleries in the world, Hauser & Wirth. At his packed January debut in the gallery, he installed a series of unique shelf sculptures--displaying objects like obscure LPs (The Clown by Charles Mingus) and bars of black shea butter. Johnson stood in the middle of the fray, holding his new baby boy, not quite looking the part of an art-world celebrity. That, however, is what he's become.
"In the last ten years, it's been a pretty constant evolution," Johnson says, a few months later. "Early on, I wanted to avoid anything that would ever suggest Afrocentrism. Later on, as a point of humor more than anything else, I started to adapt certain symbols."
As for negotiating work with fatherhood, not to mention the fact that he's so in demand now, he says he doesn't feel any pressure. If anything, he says, "it's given me a renewed enthusiasm for what I'm doing in the studio. The only pressure I see is the pressure I put on myself."
Rashid wears a jacket, t-shirt and pants by BLK DNM and shirt by Billy Reid.
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Since then, he's honed a unique style with references as varied as the films of Melvin Van Peebles to the poetry of LeRoi Jones. He recently won the High Museum's prestigious Driskell Prize, has a retrospective this month at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and joined one of the most powerful galleries in the world, Hauser & Wirth. At his packed January debut in the gallery, he installed a series of unique shelf sculptures--displaying objects like obscure LPs (The Clown by Charles Mingus) and bars of black shea butter. Johnson stood in the middle of the fray, holding his new baby boy, not quite looking the part of an art-world celebrity. That, however, is what he's become.
"In the last ten years, it's been a pretty constant evolution," Johnson says, a few months later. "Early on, I wanted to avoid anything that would ever suggest Afrocentrism. Later on, as a point of humor more than anything else, I started to adapt certain symbols."
As for negotiating work with fatherhood, not to mention the fact that he's so in demand now, he says he doesn't feel any pressure. If anything, he says, "it's given me a renewed enthusiasm for what I'm doing in the studio. The only pressure I see is the pressure I put on myself."
Rashid wears a jacket, t-shirt and pants by BLK DNM and shirt by Billy Reid.
MEET THE REST OF OUR 2012 BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE
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