Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

'Johnson is a leading voice of his generation.' - New York Times

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, Rashid Johnson has created a nuanced and iconographic body of work that connects literature, music, and art.

Personal references and pervasive cultural narratives are interweaved with the legacy of modernist abstraction, producing what critics have labelled '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 honours contributions in the field of African-American art.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Booklist Review

The interdisciplinary and collaborative spirit of Rashid Johnson's photographs, paintings, sculptures, installations, films, writings, and curation is deftly embodied in this richly illuminating, image-filled volume. The opening interview with poet, playwright, and essayist Claudia Rankine follows the trajectory of Johnson's exhibits from his student show at Columbia College in Chicago through his delving explorations of materials, themes, and juxtapositions in galleries and museums around the world. They talk about Johnson's Afro-centric childhood and the influence of his historian mother, Cheryl Johnson-Odim, and the inspiration he finds in jazz, literature, and an array of visual artists. They discuss his large installations, and his use of black soap, shea butter, and grid structures. Art historian Sampada Aranke further delineates the complexity of Johnson's art; its "invitations for association, identification or reflection," and "ongoing insistence . . . that Blackness is not monolithic." Curator Akili Tommasino focuses on The Broken Five, Johnson's "monumental mosaic," and Johnson writes about artists Sam Gilliam and Bob Thompson. A chronology tracking Johnson's numerous exhibitions wraps up this enlightening overview of a profoundly evocative and exciting body of work.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Claudia Rankine was born in Jamaica in 1963. She received a B.A. in English from Williams College and a M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University. She is the author of several collections of poetry including Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Plot, and The End of the Alphabet. Nothing in Nature is Private won the Cleveland State Poetry Prize and Citizen: An American Lyric won the 2015 Forward Prize for Best Collection. She has edited numerous anthologies including American Women Poets in the Twenty-First Century: Where Lyric Meets Language and American Poets in the Twenty-First Century: The New Poetics. She is currently the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College. She won a 2015 Forward Prize for Poetry which carried a monetary award of $21,570.

(Bowker Author Biography)