The Brooklyn Rail

Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers, on view at the Guggenheim Museum, fills Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic space with more than ninety works that chart the artist’s thirty-year career. Organized by Naomi Beckwith and Andrea Karnes, the exhibition offers an immersive take on the visual language for which Johnson is celebrated.

As visitors approach the museum, they are met by Johnson’s outdoor sculpture, Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos (2008), a large steel work with graphic-design-inspired trim lines and gun-scope references. Directly influenced by hip-hop pioneer Public Enemy, the piece incisively prompts the viewer to confront power dynamics, though its explicit symbolism may risk overt literalism. On the ground-floor,  a new untitled mosaic work (2025) made especially for the Guggenheim exhibition ambitiously attempts to create an interactive dialogue but slightly struggles to maintain conceptual cohesion amid its lush spectacle; above, however, a cascade of suspended plants redeems this ambiguity, delicately evoking a powerful tension between fragility and permanence.

Ascending the first ramp, audiences are greeted by Johnson’s photograph Self Portrait Laying on Jack Johnson’s Grave (2006), an early work that explores cultural lineages and that connects the artist’s last name and Chicago roots (where the grave site is located) with the first Black heavyweight boxer whose victory over a white fighter in 1910 triggered race riots. Moving through the retrospective, the visitor confronts Untitled Anxious Audience (2019), a wall-sized grid of ceramic tiles embedded with black soap and wax. Each tile contains a mask-like face rendered in bronze wire, with spiral eyes that create an unsettling collective gaze. The faces, though individual, form a pattern across the wall, wire outlines pressed into the monochrome surface. The work’s repetition offers a rhythm that feels both ordered and chaotic, much like the social anxiety it references.

The recurring shelving works function as spaces of both reverence and reflection. In particular, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (The Power of Healing) (2008) directly confronts Dr. Cornel West’s critiques in Race Matters (1993)—notably his examination of Black nihilism and spiritual impoverishment—through its stark black cabinet structure, meticulously adorned with ceramic vessels and personal objects. The bowls of vibrant shea butter resting on its shelves serve as both visual interruptions and symbolic gestures toward renewal, sharply juxtaposing the dark background to provoke critical reflection on West’s call for deeper moral engagement and collective cultural healing.

Post Prison Writings (2012) continues this format with a steel structure paired with stained red oak flooring, paint, black soap, shea butter, wax, oyster shells, and books; the work, its totality, creates tension between constraint and possibility. The materials themselves tell a story about cultural memory, healing practices, and intellectual freedom. Going back to the motif of shea butter, in Me, Tavis Smiley and Shea Butter (2004), a two-minute color video with sound, Johnson appears in his bathroom applying shea butter while listening to NPR. The camera captures the artist in a moment of self-care, the bathroom lighting casting shadows as Johnson moisturizes his skin. This ritual connects to the Chicago-born artist's broader interest in consumer goods and media consumption.

Progressing further, rotunda levels three and four continue an exploration of video works including Black Yoga (2010) and The New Black Yoga (2011); this segment also introduces Johnson’s breakthrough “Cosmic Slop” painting series from 2008, made of black soap and wax, which further highlights the artist’s investment in materials as cultural signifiers.

Following along the museum ramp, a text appears spray-painted. “RASHID JOHNSON A POEM FOR DEEP THINKERS” runs in bold black letters, in a manner that claims the gallery as part of the visual experience; the exhibition’s title, borrowed from American writer Amiri Baraka, reflects Johnson's longstanding engagement with literature alongside his visual practice.

Rotunda level five showcases Johnson’s sculptures, including his “Untitled Bust” series composed of heavily worked, glazed stoneware; it also contains mosaics and collages, as well as later paintings such as Anxious Red Painting “August 18th” (2020). The retrospective culminates with Sanguine (2025), a monumental installation on the museum's top level, with musical activations scheduled biweekly on Friday and Sunday afternoons. Well-situated in the upper atrium, the work features video projection, a large gridded steel structure with planted ceramics, art objects, and, notably, an upright piano. As the wall text explains, the installation evokes the systematic logic of Sol LeWitt’s modular forms and Agnes Martin’s grids, while creating something distinctly Johnson’s own. Toward the end of this ramp is a monitor presenting Johnson’s most recent films, including a 2024 film also called Sanguine, which focuses on family and lineage. He draws inspiration from the radical artistic and political movements of the 1960s through 1990s, periods of his parents’ activism and his own education, when idealists challenged hierarchies and established new orders.

As the press release states, “closing the exhibition is a never-before-seen 2025 painting hung in a contemplative area where viewers are encouraged to engage with the art in self-directed reflection.” Though mindful that these movements fell short of creating a just world, Johnson has turned equally to history and to personal experience to create multidisciplinary works that touch the viewer on multiple levels. This active space reinforces Johnson’s interest in creating environments where art becomes a shared experience rather than a solitary display.