Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers

PREORDER: This title will ship May 2025

From his early self-portraits to his site-specific installations, this volume underscores Rashid Johnson's fearless engagement with the central themes, questions and aesthetics of the contemporary era.

Co-organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, A Poem for Deep Thinkers is a three-decade survey of Rashid Johnson’s artistic career. It situates the artist within three interconnected spheres: as a scholar of art history; as a mediator of Black popular culture and its widespread commodification; and as an artist engaged with the globalization of contemporary art.

The exhibition and accompanying catalog features nearly 90 artworks, including early photographs, Cosmic Slops, spray-painted text works, collage paintings, Broken Men mosaics, film projects, and key sculptures and installations that incorporate materials such as shea butter, black soap, plants, ceramic vessels and wax. These explorations demonstrate Johnson's uncommon fluency with multiple materials and forms as well as a nuanced ability to synthesize the condition of the human psyche.

This lavish catalog is Bodonia-bound with gold block edges and printed on coated and uncoated papers. Amid more than 200 illustrations, the publication also includes creative meditations on excerpts by literary icons Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jean Genet, Paul Beatty and Amiri Baraka, interspersed among essays and an interview that illuminate Johnson’s work.

Edited with text by Naomi Beckwith, Andrea Karnes. Additional text by Mariët Westermann, Nana Adusei-Poku, Hendrik Folkerts, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, and Kevin Quashie. Interview by Odili Donald Odita.

Published by Guggenheim Museum
Hardcover, 256 pages, English, 2025