Published by Hauser & Wirth Publishers. Text by Cheryl Johnson-Odim. Art by Rashid Johnson.
This tenderly wrought artist’s book is a collaboration between American conceptual artist Rashid Johnson (born 1977) and his mother, historian Cheryl Johnson-Odim (born 1948). Bound as a single signature with silver-foiled text on the cover and multiple carefully selected papers, the book is based on an updated version of Johnson-Odim's poetry pamphlet Other Women Before Me, first published in 1985, the year her son Rashid turned eight years old. In 2022, Johnson presented the publication—along with titles by the likes of Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Claudia Rankine and Sylvia Plath—in a reading area within his exhibition Sodade at Hauser & Wirth Menorca, where the image on the cover of this publication was also on view. Johnson’s drawings are sourced from a 2020 sketchbook and bookend the poems, while the central pages of the book contain a personal and far-ranging conversation between mother and son. In a delightful touch, Johnson’s cover artwork folds out, transforming into a standalone poster.
Published by Hauser & Wirth Publishers/Aspen Art Press. Edited by Monica Davis. Text by Heidi Zuckerman, Manuela Moscoso. Interview by Claudia Schreier.
Rashid Johnson (born 1977) is renowned for challenging the assumptions often present in collective notions of Blackness. Based in New York, Johnson is among an influential group of American artists whose work employs a wide range of materials and images to explore themes of art history, literature, philosophy, and personal and cultural identity. After beginning his career working primarily in photography, Johnson has expanded into a variety of mediums, including text work, sculptural objects, installation, painting, drawing, collage, film, performance and choreography. Drawing on a dizzying array of historical, cultural, literary and musical references, Johnson ultimately invites audiences to find connections to their own lives.
Rashid Johnson: The Hikers presents works from his highly acclaimed shows at the Aspen Art Museum, Museo Tamayo and Hauser & Wirth. This dynamic and unprecedented collection of his work features a conversation between Rashid Johnson and choreographer Claudia Schreier, as well as essays by curators Heidi Zuckerman and Manuela Moscoso.
Published by Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. Edited by Ruth Addison, Kate Fowle. Introduction by Anton Belov. Text by Kate Fowle, Rashid Johnson.
Since 2001, Rashid Johnson (born 1977) has risen to international attention with his powerfully visual statements on contemporary culture. Working across painting, photography, sculpture, installation, video and performance, the artist has charted a trajectory that offers fresh readings of art history, social history, psychology and literature. Rashid Johnson: New Work follows the making of the artist’s largest work to date: an immersive, living eco-system where fact, fiction, history and mythology converge. Described by the artist as a “brain” that prioritizes poetic rather than logical reason, the work offers unexpected associations between objects, video and sound, that have become untethered from their cultural roots, to provide nuanced readings on clichés of class, nation and race. The first book to follow the development of Johnson’s sculptural and installation works, Rashid Johnson: New Work includes an interview with the artist by Kate Fowle and an extensive essay, also by Fowle, which investigates Johnson’s influences and references. The New Work series examines in depth the making of a large-scale work, focusing on methods of research and production to provide new perspectives on the practice of a mid-career or established artist whose work resonates across cultures.
PUBLISHER Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 9 x 9 in. / 80 pgs / 50 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 10/25/2016 Out of stock indefinitely
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2016 p. 157
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9785905110719FLAT40 List Price: $15.00 CAD $21.50
Published by The Drawing Center. Text by Claire Gilman, Jeremy Sigler, Cheryl Johnson-Odim.
Universally accessible and employing common visual tropes such as the monochrome and the grid, Johnson's work is also self-referential, making specific allusion to his upbringing in Chicago and the Afro-centric values of his parents. In Rashid Johnson: Anxious Men, the artist creates a site-specific installation in the Drawing Room gallery. The core of the exhibition is a new series of black-soap-and-wax-on-tile portraits that Johnson calls his “anxious men.” Executed by digging into a waxy surface, they enact a kind of drawing through erasure and represent the first time Johnson has worked figuratively outside of photography or film, and on such a small scale. Whereas Johnson’s previous work has taken a more cerebral approach to questions of race and political identity, the drawn portraits confront the viewer with a visceral immediacy. The portraits are set within a multi-sensory environment that includes wallpaper featuring a photograph of the artist’s father from the year Johnson was born, and an audio sound track comprised of Melvin Van Peebles’s “Love, That’s America,” a song that originally appeared in Peebles’s 1970 film Watermelon Man and that was recently pressed into service by the Occupy Wall Street movement. In this way, the exhibition, documented in this volume, creates an immersive space that implicates not only the artist but also the viewer in its interrogation of selfhood and identity.
PUBLISHER The Drawing Center
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 6 x 9 in. / 51 pgs / 17 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 9/27/2016 Out of stock indefinitely
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2016 p. 157
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780942324938FLAT40 List Price: $20.00 CAD $27.95 GBP £17.50
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.
PUBLISHER Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 8 x 10 in. / 96 pgs / 77 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 8/30/2012 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2012 p. 101
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780933856936TRADE List Price: $25.00 CAD $30.00
Rashid Johnson belongs to a generation of young African-American artists that takes an extremely critical approach to the search for its cultural roots. His artistic strategies, which include photography, painting and sculpture, performance and beyond, are aesthetically nonconformist and politically provocative.
Rashid Johnson: The Hikers
Rashid Johnson
Rashid Johnson: Anxious Men
Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks
Rashid Johnson: Sharpening My Oyster Knife