With over ninety works on view, Rashid Johnson’s largest solo exhibition to date transforms the Guggenheim rotunda into a living, breathing archive of memory, emotion, and cultural reckoning. The show is a journey through mediums and meanings—an artist’s search for connection, healing, and space to grow
A leading voice in contemporary American art, Rashid Johnson has spent the past three decades crafting a body of work that defies categorisation and insists on emotional truth. Now, with Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents his most ambitious solo exhibition to date—an expansive, site-specific installation that merges sculpture, film, painting, and live performance across the museum’s iconic rotunda.
Johnson, born in Chicago in 1977, emerged in the late 1990s as part of a new generation of artists interrogating identity and cultural narratives. A graduate of Columbia College and later the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he was among the youngest artists included in the landmark 2001 exhibition Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem—a show that helped shape the concept of “post-Black” art. Over the years, Johnson has become known for his emotionally charged practice that blends personal history with broader sociopolitical themes.
In his Guggenheim debut, Johnson brings together more than ninety works from across his career, including iconic pieces like Anxious Men and Broken Men, as well as the monumental new installation Sanguine. These works, layered with materials such as black soap, shea butter, ceramic tiles, books, mirrors, and live plants, pulse with urgency and introspection. Johnson’s use of culturally coded materials and recurring motifs— grids, faces, mirrors—serves as a visual language through which he explores Black identity, mental health, fatherhood, and vulnerability.
The rotunda’s spiralling architecture, envisioned by Frank Lloyd Wright as a continuous space of discovery, is the perfect stage for Johnson’s nonlinear storytelling. Rather than organising the works chronologically, the artist opted for an emotional arrangement—inviting visitors to trace connections between past and present, process and product. His early piece Mudcloth (2001), for example, places chicken bones—symbolically loaded and deliberately chosen—on photosensitised paper to evoke both ancestral memory and the formal qualities of 19th-century photography.
At the top of the rotunda stands Sanguine, a vast, immersive environment made of gridded steel structures, video works, literary texts by seminal Black authors, and towering potted plants suspended from the ceiling. A hidden piano at its centre becomes active during live performances, and a stage designed by Johnson will host a full programme of public events, including poetry readings and musical acts. It’s a nod to his belief that art is a communal act—that museums can, and should, serve as platforms for many voices.
“Art for me has always been emotional,” Johnson reflects. “There’s a catharsis in making, in revisiting these objects that represent your anxieties, your hopes.” That ethos infuses every inch of the exhibition. Even the show’s title, drawn from a poem by the late Amiri Baraka, speaks to Johnson’s reverence for Black intellectual thought and his ongoing dialogue with poets, philosophers, and musicians.
This exhibition is not just a retrospective. It’s a meditation on growth—how an artist evolves, how meaning shifts over time, and how the spaces we inhabit can inspire transformation. As Deputy Director Naomi Beckwith puts it, “Like Wright, Rashid believes that a museum is a living, breathing entity. His work doesn’t simply inhabit the building—it activates it.”
The show is on view in New York through January 18, 2026, before travelling to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and then the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. For those seeking a deeper connection with art and with the world it reflects, Johnson offers a simple proposal: “Come twice,” he says. “The work’s there to meet you.”
