Rashid Johnson

Rashid Johnson is one of America's most successful contemporary artists. He works in a variety of medium, including painting, sculpture, drawing and filmmaking.

Early Life and Education

Rashid Johnson was born in Chicago in 1977. His mother, Dr. Cheryl Johnson-Odim, was an academic scholar and a poet. His father, Jimmy Johnson, was a Vietnam Veteran, a painter and sculptor, who worked in electronics. His parents divorced when he was two years old.

Johnson majored in photography at Columbia College Chicago, where he earned at BA in 2000. In 2005 he received a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In an interview with CNN, Johnson said, “When I went to art school, it’s one of the rare scenarios where you hear that a kid goes to art school and his parents feel like they accomplished something.”

Career and Personal Life

Rashid Johnson had his first solo show at the Schneider Gallery in Chicago while a junior in college. His career took off in 2001, when his work was shown at the Freestyle Exhibition at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Johnson presented a series of documentary photographs of an African American homeless man he met in Chicago.

In 2006, Johnson moved to New York's Lower East Side and taught at the Pratt Institute.

Many successful shows followed, including solo shows at  the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, the SculptureCenter in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Miami Art Museum and High Museum of Art in Atlanta. He has participated in group shows at The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Whitney Museum of American Art. His work was included  in the Venice Biennale in 2011.

In 2011, Johnson was named one of six finalists for the Hugo Boss Prize. In 2012, he received the High Museum of Art’s David C. Driskell Prize, which honors contributions in the field of African American art.

In 2016, Johnson was appointed to Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Board of Trustees. He created a paid internship program at the Guggenheim  and supported it financially.

In 2021, he was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera in New York to create a work for one of the Opera's interior grand tier landings.

In 2022, Johnson won "Outstanding Directing in a Motion Picture (Television)" at the 51st NAACP Image Awards for his work on the film, Native Son. At Christie's November 2022 Contemporary Art auction, Johnson's Surrender Painting Sunshine (2022) painting sold for $3 million, more than triple the estimate.

Johnson's works are included in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Met, MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Rubell Museum in Miami and may other major venues.

References:
Don Lemon. Rashid Johnson makes the elite art world more inclusive. CNN Interview. September 16, 2022.
Michael Irwin. High Profile Works Go Unsold at Christie’s New York Sales. Ocula. November 25, 2022.
Judd Tully. Phillips’s $138.7m contemporary art sale in New York reflects ‘a general cautiousness in the market’. The Art Newspaper. November 16, 2022.
Carlos Suarez de Jesus. Rashid Johnson's MAM Exhibit Uses Everyday Objects to Explore Race and Identity. Miami New Times. September 13, 2012.