The Guggenheim New York presents a major solo exhibition of work by Rashid Johnson, opening April 18, 2025, and remaining on view through January 18, 2026. Encompassing the entirety of the museum's rotunda, the show is Johnson's first solo presentation at the Guggenheim, his largest exhibition to date, and the first expansive museum survey of his work in over a decade. Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers brings together more than ninety artworks, including an outdoor sculpture and new pieces made specifically for the exhibition - two of which will be activated through ongoing performances.
The survey spans pivotal phases of Johnson's career, including notable series such as The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club, Cosmic Slops, black-soap shelf paintings, spray-painted text works, the more recent Anxious Men and Broken Men series, and large-scale indoor and outdoor sculptures. The exhibition offers a loose chronology of Johnson's artistic evolution across nearly three decades, traversing cycles of social alienation, self-examination, and artistic freedom. Beginning with his early explorations in photography, video, and installations, and extending to his recent ventures into materially hybrid paintings and assemblages, Johnson brings nuance to exploring the human psyche amid the profound historical influences of our time, all while reflecting on themes of masculinity, parenthood, and care for self and others.
Explains Johnson, "This exhibition continues the conversation I've always been invested in: one that allows for freedom of expression and an awareness of artistic possibilities. I've always embraced the fluidity between mediums. For me, medium specificity has never been the goal — it's about how the project can move freely between different forms, creating space for a broader conversation that goes beyond the limitations of any one medium."
Exhibition Highlights
As visitors approach the museum, they are met by Johnson's outdoor sculpture, Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos (2008), a large steel sculpture with graphic design-inspired trim lines and gun-scope references that brings forth Jasper Johns's target works. Directly influenced by hip-hop pioneer Public Enemy, the piece invites the viewer to question who is in control. Inside the museum, the rotunda floor features Untitled (2025), a new mosaic work made especially for the Guggenheim exhibition, along with Rotunda Stage (2025), an interactive space for performances. As visitors proceed up the first ramp, they are greeted by Johnson's photograph Self-Portrait Laying on Jack Johnson's Grave (2006), an early work that explores cultural lineages, connecting 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.
The Guggenheim's High Gallery features a miniature survey of Johnson's career, showing a range of early and recent pieces, including sculptures, paintings, a mosaic, and a spray-painted text work.
On Rotunda Levels 1 and 2, visitors have the opportunity to learn about Johnson's emergence on the art scene, beginning with a series of photographs he took in his early twenties that helped launch his career when he became the youngest artist featured in Thelma Golden's seminal 2001 exhibition Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Viewers also encounter Johnson's early work in sculpture, installation, text, and video, which remains an abiding medium for the artist. Progressing through the exhibition, museumgoers will discover more of Johnson's mixed media pieces. Rotunda Levels 3 and 4 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 (2008), made of black soap and wax, underscoring Johnson's investment in materials as cultural signifiers.
Rotunda Level 5 showcases Johnson's sculptures, such as his Untitled Bust series composed of heavily worked glazed stoneware. This ramp also contains mosaics and collages, as well as later paintings such as Anxious Red Painting "August 18th" (2020).
At the top of the museum, Rotunda Level 6 features the monumental installation Sanguine, a large, gridded steel structure consisting of plants, books, and a piano that supports a series of cascading plants that seem to float in mid-air. In dialogue with the performance and public-engagement program, Sanguine's piano will be activated every Friday and Sunday. Toward the end of this ramp is a monitor presenting Johnson's most recent films, including a 2024 film also called Sanguine, which focus on relationship with the maternal and paternal sides of his family. 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.
About the artist:
Born in Chicago in 1977, Rashid Johnson earned a BA in Photography from Columbia College in Chicago, followed by graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he honed his multidisciplinary practice. Johnson has a long history with the Guggenheim New York as an exhibiting artist (shown, most recently, in By Way Of: Material and Motion in the Guggenheim Collection in 2024 and Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim in 2015); as a supporter and funder of the museum's internship program; and as a former member of the museum's Board of Trustees. He is included in the Guggenheim collection with four artworks, ranging from sculptural painting to film and video. His work has been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Institute of Contemporary Photography, New York; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
For nearly three decades, Johnson has cultivated a diverse body of work, drawing upon art history, philosophy, literature, and music as conceptual frameworks. Through this multidisciplinary approach, Johnson has developed a distinct visual language that engages with the central themes, questions, and aesthetics of the contemporary era, such as race and masculinity, and the conditions of artmaking when conventions around medium and meaning have been upended. The exhibition situates Johnson within interconnected spheres: as a discerning scholar of art history; as a mediator of Black popular culture and its widespread commodification; and as a creative citizen engaged with the vast global circulation of contemporary art.
