I am strongly attracted to visual art. I’m a poet with visual art dreams who can take an okay photo but can’t draw or paint any better than a 5th grader. Visiting New York last summer was my first time in the Guggenheim and my first time feeling so strongly moved by and drawn into an exhibit. The featured artist was Rashid Johnson, whom I’d just heard about the previous week after randomly seeing his profile on CBS Sunday. At the time, I never expected to see his Guggenheim exhibit in person.
I had good times engaging with artists Kara Walker, Robert Rauschenberg, Keith Herring and plenty others. But something different and deeper sprouted within me while strolling through the gallery. His work communicates with history, memory and is vividly tactile. He produces work one can feel with their eyes, which thrills me. Organic mixtures of mirrors, wood, live plants, bamboo, tiles, black soap, shea butter. It is work that lives. He doesn’t seem to ‘make’ art, but capture it mid-air. The work seem egoless. Despite the inclusion of books in his materials, he isn’t bragging about literacy, but creating a kind of conversation between the authors (Paul Beatty, Richard Wright, Dick Gregory, among others) himself and the visitors to his installations.
Johnson was very much a living presence within the gallery because the work created an electrical response within guests. Upon entering, one is first compelled to look up at the Guggenheim skylight where dozens of potted plants hover suspended above, a configuration of trapeze aerialists. There thrives an anxious pulse in Johnson’s work that makes one feel as if they’re interacting with an entity instead of the creative impulses of an artist. Due in part to the presence of growing plants, softening shea butter, his work appears to breathe, grow, change while you experience it. Johnson is a thrilling, powerful artist.
Painter, sculptor, installation artist and photographer Rashid Johnson was born in Chicago in 1977. For more information about his work, please visit.
The Dirty Rat 