CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/16/2025

Hot book alert! 'Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers'

Featured spreads are from the catalog to Rashid Johnson’s critically acclaimed, three-decade-spanning retrospective on view now at the Guggenheim Museum, en route to Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and MCA Chicago, 2026–2027. Spanning from Johnson’s early self-portraits to his site-specific installations, this beautifully produced volume, printed with gold block edges, takes its title from a poem by Amiri Baraka and features writings by curators Naomi Beckwith and Andrea Karnes, Guggenheim Director Mariët Westermann and a host of luminaries including Nana Adusei-Poku, Hendrik Folkerts, Tiona Nekkia McClodden and Kevin Quashie, in addition to an interview with Odili Donald Odita. Beckwith quotes the artist: “The subject of my work is freedom.” But she distinguishes this statement from the work’s purpose. “He has learned … that the instrumentalization of Black artists’ work toward the purpose of freedom rarely ends well. The purpose of his work is to help him walk the razor’s edge between dichotomies—being and nonbeing, community and individualism, past and future, particularities and capaciousness—and to give form and format to a way of both seeing the world and being in a world of infinite, intertwining possibilities. For Johnson, freedom means an autonomous zone of uninhibited creativity, a tapping into an unconscious flow and getting ‘lost’ in that; of being removed from instrumentalization. … As a scholar of Black cultural history, from slave narratives to Afrofuturism, from Beat poetry to hip-hop, Rashid Johnson is familiar with the neutering effects of Black resistance and brilliance when it is absorbed and packaged by a dominant culture: to be captured is a fate far worse than death.”