Celebrated contemporary artist spotlighted at Kemper Art Museum

“A lot of the work I grew up seeing by black artists very much depicted a problem,” artist Rashid Johnson said during the PBS mini-documentary Art 21: A New York Close Up. “I wanted to make something that didn’t necessarily speak to a problem.”

Out of his “anti-inspiration” came the New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club – a series of images heavily inspired by the work of Harlem Renaissance photographer James Van Der Zee.

“I think the black experience is very much invested in the history of escapism,” Johnson said. “You have blacks wanting to go from the South to the North. Then you have Marcus Garvey and he says, ‘Let’s go back to Africa,’ and you have Sun Ra and he says, ‘Don’t worry about it, we’re going to go to Saturn.’”

This weekend Johnson will come to St. Louis for the opening reception for Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks. The exhibit – which includes images from The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club – will be displayed at Washington University’s Mildred Kemper Art Museum from September 20 – January 6. It’s the first major solo museum exhibition to survey the career of the Chicago-born, New York-based artist.

Using photography, painting, sculpture and video, Johnson challenges deeply-rooted ways of thinking about the black experience and issues of race in America. Johnson incorporates commonplace objects from his childhood into his work in a process he describes as “hijacking the domestic.” He transforms these materials – plants, books, record albums, photographs, shea butter, soap – into conceptually loaded and visually compelling art that investigates the construction of identity.

Born in Chicago in 1977, Johnson earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Columbia College Chicago in 2000 and attended the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003. In 2005 he moved to New York, where he currently lives and works.

Johnson has exhibited widely in both the United States and Europe. Recent solo exhibitions include New Growth, Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2013); Smoke and Mirrors, Sculpture Center, New York (2009); Sharpening My Oyster Knife, Kunstmuseum Magdeburg, Germany (2008); and The Production of Escapism, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (2005).

Major group exhibitions include the 9th Shanghai Biennale, Reactivation, China (2012) and the 54th Venice Biennale, ILLUMInations, Italy (2011).

Message to Our Folks is titled after a 1969 album by avant-garde jazz collective the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The exhibition is curated by Julie Rodrigues Widholm, Pamela J. Alper Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, where it debuted in 2012. The St. Louis exhibition is curated by Meredith Malone, associate curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

The exhibit not only creates an artistic narrative of his personal journeys and more than decade-long professional career, but Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks

also showcases Johnson’s varied sources of inspiration: boxing legend Jack Johnson, comedian Dick Gregory, soul singer Al Green, rap group Public Enemy and author/illustrator Aaron McGruder.

“Aaron McGruder writes this comic strip called ‘The Boondocks,’ and he had this quote that said, ‘Why does every black person think that they were chased by dogs and sprayed by hoses?’” Johnson said.

“It’s important for you live your own history. And if you are consistently burdened by a bigger history that may have affected your existence – but is not your specific story – then you are doing yourself a disservice. It’s not fully about the predicament of history. It’s also about what you are able to author yourself – and that you are able to form the future rather than live in the past.”

Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folkswill open with a public reception 7-9 p.m. Friday, Sept. 20, and will remain on view through Jan. 6, 2014. Both the reception and the exhibition are free and open to the public. For more information, call (314) 935-4523 or visit kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu.