EXHIBITING ANGST

How Rashid Johnson channeled his anxiety into art, became successful beyond his wildest dreams, and got a major solo show at the Guggenheim

- BELINDA LUSCOMBE

JAN. 28, 1986, WAS A DAY THAT CHANGED RASHID Johnson. He remembers the TV set being rolled into his elementary-school classroom in Evanston, Ill. He remembers watching with his classmates as the space shuttle Challenger flew into the air and transformed into a stream of white cloud. “I remember how that affected my thinking, recognizing that failure was possible amongst adults, amongst folks who we were supposed to trust,” says the artist, sitting in his spacious Brooklyn studio, surrounded by works that are being prepared for a massive midcareer survey at the Guggenheim in New York City. “That was a big one for me.”

Seeing the footage of Rodney King being beaten by police in Los Angeles in 1991 also loomed large in Johnson’s life, as well as the acquittal of those officers of any wrongdoing, and the riots that followed. “I was in my young teenage years at that point,” says Johnson, now 47. “And becoming aware of the angst and anxiety and frustration of Black folks in America against the backdrop of what absolutely felt like incredibly unfair decisionmaking by the collective.”

The artist has lived through joyous moments in history too—two days before the Challenger explosion, the Bears won their first and only Super Bowl—but it’s the alarming ones that made the biggest impression. “I was an anxious kid,” he says. “I think what we’re exposed to at different stages in our lives absolutely informs how we see the world.”

Johnson has spent his career exploring, via his hands, what it means to be unsettled and what it means to be Black and what it means to be male and what it means to be Rashid Johnson, using whatever medium he finds inspiring at the time.