Rashid Johnson: “Black thinkers and creators are tired of being denied autonomous space”

Success didn't come with an instruction manual for Rashid Johnson.

No one is born knowing how to deal with it, but for a black artist like him it was even more difficult to fit the experience of triumph into a society like the United States, surrendered more than any other to his cult.

“I have had to teach myself to enjoy my achievements, in order to share those lessons with those who came after me,” he acknowledged in an interview held one morning in May at his studio in Brooklyn, New York.

They don't usually invite theirs to the party.

And if they do, it is never with a companion.

“It's like when you are struck by lightning;

you can suggest to others that they go outside in the middle of the storm, but that does not guarantee that they will have the same luck”.

Painter, photographer, ceramicist, sculptor, draftsman and filmmaker, Johnson (Chicago, 1977) enjoys a central place in American art, from which he reflects poetically, but also politically, on collective anxiety, race, class, gender, cultural identity, and the African-American experience.

Pampered by the market, cheered on by critics and courted by the great museums, he is also a fine analyst on some of the great topics of debate in a fractured and disoriented country.

Although he is opposed to being reduced to an antagonism.

“Black thinkers and creators are tired of being systematically denied an autonomous space: we are only allowed to exist in the face of white privilege.

My work doesn't necessarily fit there;

it exists in an independent place,” he argues.

“People project their prejudices onto my work, which is interpreted based on a dangerous set of expectations that generates the idea of ​​what is and is not an African-American artist, but not only, also the idea of ​​what a Latino creator is. or

or a woman artist.

They reduce you to a cliché.”

Artist Rashid Johnson in his studio in Brooklyn, New York, with a work from his 'Seascapes' series in the background.

Vincent Tullo

His work, which blends individual and collective experiences, can be seen from June 19, for the first time in Spain, at the Menorcan headquarters of Hauser & Wirth, his gallery for more than a decade, which is also one of the most powerhouses of the art world.

On the Balearic island, in that hybrid of commercial space and foundation opened last summer in a former military hospital that can only be reached by boat from Mahón, Johnson has prepared an exhibition of paintings and sculptures entitled

The inspiration comes from a song from the fifties popularized by the Cape Verdean Cesaria Evora, and in this she is faithful to a constant in her artistic practice: resorting to the past to think about the present.

This time she reflects on the "sensation of melancholy and longing", which she considers a "good reflection of the world in which we live".

is the Creole variant of the Portuguese saudade, and Johnson considers that "this yearning, this wanting something different from what we have to live", he defines contemporary societies.

A work on paper from one of the series chosen for Menorca rests on the floor of the enormous half-empty room that Johnson has chosen for the interview.

Here he personally works on his pieces.

In one corner there is a pile of work gloves, which he uses to spread the paint on those silhouettes he calls “anxious men”, for whom he sometimes uses a color created and baptized by him as

like the melancholic composition by Fats Waller.

To explain the reasons for the repetition of these motifs, he turns to one of his great inspirations: jazz.

"Like an improviser, I start from a standard, and from there, in the space left by those patterns, I find the freedom to meditate."

With musicians like Miles Davis or Charlie Parker, Johnson shares a "taste for escapism".

"For me, that concept, so rewarding, is not negative," he argues.

“Jazz, like abstraction, has a lot to do with leaving the body, letting the mind move through space”.

In his workshop, where he employs eight people, there is some mass production.

There is the carpentry, the place for painting, the warehouse where he keeps his work and that of other artists, and the ceramics and mosaics laboratory, which presides over a sophisticated machine for firing the materials.

His wife, Sheree Hovsepian, of Iranian origin, was working in a corner of that large room on the day of the interview.

A successful artist like him, his

are on display right now at the Venice Biennale.

There is also a foosball table and a basketball hoop.

The space of Rashid Johnson's studio dedicated to ceramics.

Vincent Tullo

Johnson grew up in Evanston, Illinois, in an intellectual environment, the son of a historian, Cheryl Johnson-Odim, an expert on sub-Saharan Africa who introduced him to the work of black thinkers like Amiri Baraka, WEB Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington. and Jimmy Johnson, a guy with artistic aspirations who ended up dedicating himself to electronic devices.

They divorced when he was a child.

His first interest as a student was photography, a discipline that he later parked.

“In the nineties”, he justifies himself, “the smart kids dedicated themselves to that;

painting was then dominated by the boring survivors of the previous decade”.

The last art in which he has stood out is cinema, with the film

(released in 2019 by HBO), based on the homonymous classic by Richard Wright, whose protagonist, Bigger Thomas, is a wayward boy facing the world in Chicago. from the thirties.

Johnson updated that archetype of African-American literature with an aesthetic somewhere between punk and goth.

“It was my way of saying that times have changed, but the problems remain similar for the Biggers of the world.

It was a complicated process, the project began with Obama in the White House and ended with Trump at the helm, which meant a wild change in the contexts in which the story was conceived and released.

The artist read the novel as a teenager, more or less at the same time that his inexhaustible interest in music was ignited, which grew with each visit to a Chicago record store, Jazz Record Mart, an institution still in operation that, he says, "it changed his life."

"I spent the whole day talking to the shop assistants, listening to records: I could put 500, although finally, since I had no money, I only took one".

Some of the ceramic pieces created by the artist.

Vincent Tullo

Success came quickly, at the age of 24, thanks to the collective exhibition Freestyle, organized at The Studio Museum in Harlem, where he participated with photographs with romantic overtones that recalled the work of the great New York neighborhood portraitist: James Van Der Zee.

Johnson was the youngest of the batch of African-American artists that the curator of that exhibition, Thelma Golden, packaged with a label that made a fortune: post-conceptual black art (post-conceptual black art), which played with the idea of ​​​​the regeneration of the intellectual fabric of a community anxious for more than a century for the definitive rebirth to arrive.

He finds the label "useful and interesting", although he regrets that "it is often misunderstood".

He feels more comfortable with another of the movements to which his work has been ascribed: Afrofuturism, a concept that was on the margins and that in recent times has been placed at the center of discourse, to the point of inspiring musical aesthetics. (Janelle Monáe), festivals (such as the one held this year at Carnegie Hall), a permanent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and even a Hollywood blockbuster

Johnson is particularly interested in the figure of one of his precursors, the jazz pianist and cosmic thinker Sun Ra (1914-1993), who, as part of his aesthetic commitment, always maintained that he was born on Saturn.

“It was his way of telling us that there is more to the universe than meets the eye.

It is a very powerful idea from the perspective of the black community, the idea that it is possible to go beyond the limitations that society imposes on you.

That is why the discourse of Afrofuturism has spread so much in contemporary America.

Our lives changed drastically when they took us out of Africa and brought us to America.

If humanity evolved as an interplanetary species, how would our place in the world change then?

So far, Johnson has only moved once.

It was in 2005, to New York, where he has not done badly: he has conquered privileged spaces, such as the Guggenheim (he is a member of its board of trustees), the Metropolitan Opera (in whose lobby two of his large-format mosaics are exhibited) or the La Guardia airport, where a large piece of ceramics has just been installed.

After more than a decade in a house on the Lower East Side, he now lives with his wife and their 10-year-old son in Gramercy Park, one of the most exclusive areas of Manhattan.

“New York is still the world capital of art, and it works well for me to work from that center,” he says about a place that, despite the general impression, does not find him so changed after the pandemic, “precisely because its nature is the change;

The coronavirus does not matter, or if it is Tuesday or Thursday, it is defined by constant mutation.

The 'Sodade' exhibition can be seen at the Hauser + Wirth gallery in Menorca from June 19 to November 13. Vincent Tullo

The confinement was spent in the house he has on Long Island.

In the basement he produced the series

, in which he repeated the motif of anxious men to the extreme of manic overlapping of his figures.

Those pieces became an artistic icon of the first quarantine.

In an essay he published on CNN, he wrote: “Anxiety is a part of my life.

It's something that people of color don't discuss as much as they should."

“Sharing it with others”, he says in the interview, has helped him realize that he is not “alone”.

The drawings were exhibited online (and sold immediately) in full confinement, a few weeks before the anxiety of the agony of a black man named George Floyd, murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, took over the United States on May 25, 2020. .

Johnson found out "on Instagram, in a video that lacked any context."

He didn't need it.

“I knew right away that I had witnessed a murder, and I told my wife so,” he recalls.

When asked if the social upheaval that followed has changed things in his country, the artist replies: “Who knows?

The conversations have evolved, that much is clear.

There are ideas and certain language that have been incorporated into the common lexicon.

In practical terms: if I were stopped today, I would surely be less likely to experience a violent interaction with the police.”

Johnson says such unpleasant experiences "are part of the upbringing of any black man in America."

In his opinion, the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement has also had its consequences in art.

“Things are changing, although the question remains who are the guardians of the gates of the canon.

There are institutions and analysis frameworks that still decide who enters and who does not.

I do think though

Detail of an artist's mosaic.

Vincent Tullo

Those changes are also straining relations between the two countries that, left and right, now make up the United States.

One of the Republicans' battle horses is the teaching in schools of what is known as the

(critical racial theory), which argues that racism is systemic, and transcends individuals and their prejudices.

Johnson, as the father of a 10-year-old boy, finds such controversy "preposterous."

“It is not true that they are taught that theory.

They also do not know the true history of this country.

For example, they don't explain to them that some of the founding fathers owned slaves, and that my son goes to a progressive school in New York;

That teaching job is up to me to complete when he gets home.

The worst is when those who oppose the teaching of racism slip into more dangerous places, such as replacement theory.

The artist refers to that conspiracy that considers that the left-wing elites, with the help of the Jews, are stealthily replacing whites with people of other races, more docile when it comes to voting.

It is the fuel that recently moved the boy who showed up at a supermarket in an African-American neighborhood in Buffalo with an assault rifle and a mission to “kill blacks” (he murdered 10).

That mass shooting was followed shortly after by the massacre at a Texas elementary school, in which 19 children were killed.

“We have reached a point of desensitization, to the idea that this is the world we have had to live in, period.

When I was growing up in the Midwest we had tornado drills.

On the West Coast, they rehearsed for earthquakes.

And in the East, they prepared for hurricanes.

Now the children, wherever they are from,

they learn paramilitary tactics to save their lives.

Seen from the outside, this country must seem completely insane,” says Johnson.

And it's hard not to agree with him.

View of the exhibition 'Rashid Johnson.

Sodade' in Hauser & Wirth Menorca.

Rashid Johnson (Hauser & Wirth)

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