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MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART CHICAGO
Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks
Foreword by Madeleine Grynsztejn. Text by Julie Rodrigues Widholm, Paul Beatty, Ian Bourland, Touré.
Message to Our Folks is the most comprehensive documentation of New York–based artist Rashid Johnson’s work to date. Johnson (born 1977) explores the complexities and contradictions of black identity in the United States, incorporating commonplace objects from his childhood in a process he describes as “hijacking the domestic,” and transforming materials such as wood, mirrors, tiles, rugs, CB radios, shea butter and plants into conceptually loaded and visually compelling works that shatter assumptions about the homogeneity of black subjecthood. Published in the new MCA Monographs series, Message to Our Folks accompanies the artist’s first major solo museum exhibition and features essays by curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm, novelist and critic Touré and art historian Ian Bourland and an excerpt from Paul Beatty’s trenchant and comic coming-of-age novel, The White Boy Shuffle.
Featured image, Rashid Johnson's 2008 sculpture, "Souls of Black Folk," is reproduced from Message to Our Folks.
FROM THE BOOK
"Rashid Johnson is associated with the Post-Black ethos because of the art he makes, because he's part of the Post-Black era (i.e., now), and because he was part of curator Thelma Golden's legendary 2001 show Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem, which introduced the phrase Post-Black to the world. His work revels in the freedom of Post-Blackness as it embraces Black culture and history, showing deep knowledge of and love for Blackness and Black history while also being subversive or irreverent about it, sometimes hilariously so. The work shows he loves Black culture and history while he demands the freedom to relate to it in whatever way he chooses…"
Excerpt is from Touré's essay, "The Rashid Gaze," reproduced in Message to Our Folks.
FORMAT: Hbk, 8 x 10 in. / 96 pgs / 77 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $25.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $30 ISBN: 9780933856936 PUBLISHER: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago AVAILABLE: 8/30/2012 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: No longer our product AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Foreword by Madeleine Grynsztejn. Text by Julie Rodrigues Widholm, Paul Beatty, Ian Bourland, Touré.
Message to Our Folks is the most comprehensive documentation of New York–based artist Rashid Johnson’s work to date. Johnson (born 1977) explores the complexities and contradictions of black identity in the United States, incorporating commonplace objects from his childhood in a process he describes as “hijacking the domestic,” and transforming materials such as wood, mirrors, tiles, rugs, CB radios, shea butter and plants into conceptually loaded and visually compelling works that shatter assumptions about the homogeneity of black subjecthood. Published in the new MCA Monographs series, Message to Our Folks accompanies the artist’s first major solo museum exhibition and features essays by curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm, novelist and critic Touré and art historian Ian Bourland and an excerpt from Paul Beatty’s trenchant and comic coming-of-age novel, The White Boy Shuffle.
