Darren Walker invites you to join us for an inspiring conversation with Rashid Johnson, as the widely celebrated artist introduces the most comprehensive publication on his work to date: Rashid Johnson.
Working across media, Johnson combines personal history and cultural narratives in his art practice. In this installment of Ideas at Ford, Walker discusses with Johnson the range of influences and preoccupations–including those focused on African American intellectual and imaginative life–that have creatively shaped him and his body of work.
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Rashid Johnson, the most recent addition to Phaidon’s lauded Contemporary Artists Series, is the most comprehensive publication to date on widely celebrated artist Rashid Johnson. Working with a variety of media that includes painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance, Johnson has created a nuanced and iconographic body of work that connects literature, music, and art. Personal references and pervasive cultural narratives are interwoven with the legacy of modernist abstraction, producing what critics have labeled ‘conceptual post-black art’. A precocious talent (his work was included in the seminal ‘Freestyle’ exhibition in New York in 2001), Johnson received the High Museum of Art’s David C. Driskell Prize, which honors contributions in the field of African-American art. Published in November 2023, Rashid Johnson includes contributions by Claudia Rankine, Sampada Aranke, and Akili Tommasino.
Born in Chicago in 1977, Rashid Johnson is among an influential cadre of contemporary American artists whose work employs a wide range of media to explore themes of art history, individual and shared cultural identities, personal narratives, literature, philosophy, materiality, and critical history. Johnson received a BA in Photography from Columbia College in Chicago and studied for his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Johnson’s practice quickly expanded to embrace a wide range of media—including sculpture, painting, drawing, filmmaking, and installation—yielding a complex multidisciplinary practice that incorporates diverse materials rich with symbolism and personal history. Johnson’s work is known for its narrative embedding of a pointed range of everyday materials and objects, often associated with his childhood and frequently referencing aspects of history and cultural identity. Many of Johnson’s more recent works delve into existential themes such as personal and collective anxiety, interiority, and liminal space.
Darren Walker is president of the Ford Foundation, a $16 billion international social justice philanthropy. Under his leadership, the Ford Foundation became the first non-profit in US history to issue a $1 billion designated social bond to stabilize non-profit organizations in the wake of COVID-19. Before joining Ford, Darren was vice president at The Rockefeller Foundation. Previously, he was COO of Harlem’s Abyssinian Development Corporation. Darren co-founded both the US Impact Investing Alliance and the Presidents’ Council on Disability Inclusion in Philanthropy. He serves on many boards, including the National Gallery of Art, Carnegie Hall, the High Line, the Smithsonian, National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Committee to Protect Journalists.
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