Untitled (Anxious Red) by Rashid Johnson

The works, or Anxious Audiences, as Rashid Johnson calls them, represent a collective response to the seemingly never-ending series of police shootings of unarmed black men, as well as to the divisive and troubling social rift that grew between Americans in the shadow of the then upcoming 2016 presidential election. Constant in Johnson’s oeuvre of mostly sculpture and photography are themes of race and the black experience, with his earlier inspiration being primarily historical. Johnson is a voracious reader, citing works by James Baldwin, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Richard Wright, Claudia Rankine, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Paul Beatty.

Rashid Johnson, born in Chicago in 1977, is a prominent contemporary American artist whose multidisciplinary work spans various media to examine art history, cultural identities, personal narratives, literature, philosophy, materiality, and critical history. Johnson earned a BA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago and pursued his master’s studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.