In the foreword to Civil Wars (1981), poet and essayist June Jordan unpicks the entanglements of the private and public. "My life”, she argues, “seems to be an increasing revelation of the intimate face of universal struggle”. Tracing a through line from the immediate to the distant - family, neighbourhood, your ‘people’, the land of your origins - Jordan returns to the self: “then if you’re lucky [...] everything comes back to you”.

It is this meeting of interior and exterior, personal and public that forms the subject of Rashid Johnson’s (b. 1977, Chicago) resonant A Poem for Deep Thinkers, currently on view at the Guggenheim, New York. Bringing together 90 works produced over the course of three decades, the mid-career survey takes up almost the entirety of the museum, with works lining its rotunda, suspended in its atrium and staged outdoors. A long backward glance at Johnson’s corpus, the exhibition is organised in a “loosely chronological” configuration, per the museum’s press release, with works tracing the artist’s evolution from early student experiments, through his emergence in the art scene and to his contemporary practice as one of the most celebrated conceptual artists in the United States.

A Poem for Deep Thinkers borrows its title from poet and activist Amiri Baraka’s work of the same name, setting the tone for an exhibition that is markedly polyphonic. Speaking of his relationship with poetry for an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2023, Johnson described it as “a mode that acts as a mirror for all other mediums”. An awareness of the porosity of medium is a guiding principle for the insistently multi-disciplinary Johnson, whose work travels between registers and forms – a single concern articulated and re-articulated through new materials, treatments and gestures. Reflecting this approach, A Poem for Deep Thinkers invites the visitor on a meandering journey through mediums, with works spanning photography, video, installation, textile and sculpture staged across the museum’s six levels.

The opening section of the exhibition addresses this diffuseness explicitly. Titled ‘Death is a Good Start’, it groups works that abandon convention in favour of new configurations, of meaning and of medium. ‘Death’ is enacted through a textual injunction on felt (Stay Black and Die, 2005), as a bronze boat that suggests new journeys (Fire Pit “High Life”, 2022) and in the grimaces of near-identical faces rendered in black soap and wax (Untitled Anxious Audience, 2019). The breadth of Johnson’s oeuvre is immediately clear: here is an artist unfettered by the deadness of neat boundaries, committed, instead, as he noted in a 2010 interview, to “new mediums, not the separation of them”.

While Johnson’s engagement with medium is composite and experimental, the language through which he navigates it is singular. At the heart of the artist’s work is the shape of contemporary Black life, understood along dimensions that are cultural, psychological, historical and personal. Across A Poem for Deep Thinkers, Johnson explores ideas of racial anxiety and kinship, spirituality and symbolism, precarity and placeness. In this project, material serves as tool and object, with the artist developing what the exhibition text terms a distinct “material vernacular”: wax, bronze, mirror, books and plants used alongside black soap and shea butter, substances with particular significance within rituals of Black self-care.

In keeping with the fluidity of Johnson’s practice, his chosen materials are not held apart but encouraged to interact - most visibly in his ‘shelf-paintings’, altar-like installations that evoke both a spiritual valence and the familiarity of the wall-mounted television unit. In Triple Consciousness (2009), Johnson arranges bowls of shea butter, brass sand dollars and a plant on low wooden shelves coated in black wax. Above them, three copies of singer Al Green’s Greatest Hits sit side by side, bookended by candelabras. The title of the work is a play on W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of Double Consciousness - the burden of dual self-perception carried by racial minorities. In Johnson’s treatment, the idea of doubleness is expanded, the addition of a third facet suggesting a Black experience that is at once multiple and mutable, not two-sided, but plural, fragmented and endlessly changeable. The deployment of everyday, even homely, objects in pursuit of this critical vision is significant, casting the home as a radical site of self-fashioning and the cultural object as a totem.

That Johnson’s engagement with Black life - personal and public - is staged through the domestic is no accident. The artist has admitted a preoccupation with everyday sites and materials, describing his process, in a quote accompanying the exhibition Seven Rooms and a Garden (2024) at Moderna Museet, as “kind of hijacking things that we’re familiar with and essentially occupying them”. This is demonstrated in Me, Tavis Smiley and Shea Butter (2004), a video work in which the artist applies shea butter to his body as he listens to The Tavis Smiley Show, the first NPR program hosted by an African-American presenter. Staging an intimate ritual of self-care, carried out in the privacy of a bathroom, for the camera, Johnson muddies the waters of interiority and exteriority. The artist’s intervention brings the personal, culturally meaningful act to public visibility, just as the politically significant public broadcast penetrates a space of physical and spiritual interiority.

In an essay from the catalogue for A Poem for Deep Thinkers, curator Naomi Beckwith highlights this multi-directionality, identifying, in Johnson’s work, two “foundational tendencies [...] one looking outward, into a landscape, across time and history [...] the other inward-facing, introspective, domestically (privately) situated”. At the far end of the exhibition and coming two decades after Me, Tavis Smiley and Shea Butter, the video work Sanguine (2024) turns its attention to the artist’s domestic sphere, this time through the lens of kinship. The biographical work captures Johnson, his father and his son in various acts of quiet communion: reading side by side in a living room, working in a garden, lying together on a beach. Interspersed with these gentle scenes of Black masculinity are external symbols: African masks, ritualistic gestures, a voice reading lines from Baraka’s poem. In locating himself within a patrilineal tradition of tenderness, Johnson extends his engagement with the domestic from the spatial to the social, presenting the inner world as a shared and mutually produced space; one that is not held apart from the outside world by hard boundaries, but instead held together by acts of familial care.

If Johnson’s concern is with an immediate and literal kinship, it is also with kinship as expansively imagined. A Poem for Deep Thinkers abounds with references to a tradition that precedes the artist, Johnson invoking Black poets, activists, musicians and thinkers: Amiri Baraka, Tavis Smiley, Al Green, W.E.B. Du Bois. In the opening work of the exhibition, Self Portrait laying on Jack Johnson's Grave (2006), the artist’s limp form is draped over the tombstone of Black boxer Jack Johnson, whose heavyweight championship victory sparked race riots across the United States. At once an homage and a claim to lineage, the act aligns the artist with a cultural predecessor, suggesting connections – of name, heritage and embodied experience – that support a more malleable idea of selfhood. Through these citational gestures, Johnson positions himself as an artist profoundly desirous of conversation with his forebears, be that in a relationship of reverence, dialogue, or inheritance.

As the viewer ascends to the final levels of A Poem for Deep Thinkers, they are guided into an expansive steel armature. Here, there is a coming together of the exhibition’s materials and concerns: living plants, textiles, books, ceramics. Positioned under the Guggenheim’s vast skylight, the lush, site-specific installation, also titled Sanguine, is described as a “‘house’ of creativity”. Johnson’s installation is a culmination and an invitation, welcoming the viewer into a conceptual home whose open framework is designed to be sat in, walked through and considered at close quarters. In Sanguine, as in Johnson’s broader body of work, the home is a site of reflection and, possibly, repair. With it, A Poem for Deep Thinkers completes a journey through reckoning and transformation to introspection and tenderness, looking outward before returning to a plural, multivalent self.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.

‘Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers’ is on view at the Guggenheim, New York, from April 18, 2025 - January 18, 2026.