Being honored with a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim is arguably one of the most significant milestones an American artist can achieve. Despite the curatorial challenges posed by its distinctive architecture, the museum’s spiraling structure offers a uniquely fluid exhibition pathway, allowing an artist’s entire oeuvre and conceptual inquiry to unfold organically across levels. In “A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” Rashid Johnson takes over the Guggenheim’s iconic rotunda with a sweeping survey spanning three decades of practice—a testament to the richly layered complexity of his work, dense with both political and philosophical meaning. Featuring nearly ninety pieces—from his iconic Anxious Men, altar shelves and soap paintings to more radical performance-based photography and video—this exhibition maps Johnson’s sustained engagement with materials and objects as a system of thought, building from them a personal symbolic code and language of sorts to embark on a deep reflection, confronting collective questions of human vulnerability at a moment that is both overwhelmingly complex and acutely fragile.
“My practice is fairly layered, as I use art as a space for contemplation and to investigate freedom and will,” Johnson told Observer a week before the exhibition’s opening. “I think of it as a kind of spiritual place—one that allows me to illustrate and reflect on the world while also giving me a sense of agency.”
What emerges from this exhibition is a more multilayered understanding of Johnson’s oeuvre—one that reaches far beyond identity politics and racial inequality, even as his practice remains deeply anchored in the literary and intellectual traditions of the African American community. The portrait that takes shape is not only that of an artist but of a philosopher grappling with broader political and spiritual questions about the human condition. “My practice has, over time, inherited a different kind of existential quality,” Johnson said. “There’s an investigation of the interior world—an investment in and engagement with interiority and deep thinking.”
Johnson views his art as a marker of time, and the show reflects that, serving as both a witness to his practice and a chronicle of his life. “When you think about things that are allowed to mark time and that can capture and even illustrate moments from your life, you approach the idea of totality, which includes contemplations on death,” he reflected. “Art is a way to capture the wholeness of our existence.”
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Indeed, death is a recurring theme throughout the exhibition, surfacing in works that confront both the physical and psychological fragility of human existence, while often urging us to embrace it as part of a necessary cycle of transformation and renewal. Death is a Good Start is the title of the show’s opening chapter, encountered as visitors begin their ascent. Endings, Johnson suggests, are prerequisites for new beginnings—opportunities for meditation on both personal and historical transformation.
In this sense, death is not an end but the beginning of a new journey—into an afterlife or otherworldly dimensions already evoked in his Soul Painting Six Souls and the fire pit High Life. As recognition often arrives only after passing, death can also mark the birth of a legend, as in Self-Portrait laying on Jack Johnson’s Grave, which opens the exhibition. It can even become a destination—a form of respite or escape—as suggested by Death is Golden. Each of these works contemplates the enigmatic migration from the physical to the metaphysical, embracing death as a portal of transformation.
Collapsing distinctions between media and technique, Johnson’s practice embraces a kind of alchemical fluidity, where materials and ideas are constantly evolving. “The subject of my work is freedom,” he emphasized, expressing a deep desire to transcend constraints in art, culture and even time.
At the Guggenheim, Johnson offers an epic journey rooted in his own experience as a human cast into the world who, through creativity, asserts the agency to make sense of it beyond any given or preordained narrative. Yet this journey is not his alone; it invites a broader identification, forging emotional and subconscious connections with others.
As in a poem, objects in Johnson’s work endlessly transfigure, becoming symbols and signifiers laden with meaning yet capable of expansion, redirection or recalibration through dialectical juxtapositions. His practice reflects a deep investment in the behavior of materials and how they can be transformed, both physically and semantically, through the artist’s agency. Ongoing experimentation opens space to imagine ever-new ways of being and making meaning in the world. Across his work, there is a persistent drive—an invitation, even—to leave a mark, traced through objects and creative acts, as a way to resist nihilistic conclusions.
Nevertheless, this fundamental uncertainty and the contemplation of life’s inherent transience give rise to an irrepressible sense of anxiety—one that seems to define the condition of contemporary man in an era where idols and established religions have faded, leaving individuals in a perpetual search for meaning. “I think this sense of anxiety is part of me, to some degree. I was an anxious person for much of my life,” Johnson said. “We’re growing up in a time in our world, and in America in particular, of extreme uncertainty.” Yet Johnson believes in the possibility of radical creative resistance and of reclaiming agency through meditation and self-reflection as a way to confront the chaotic nature of the cosmos. “There’s a particular kind of opportunity we’ve developed amongst each other, where we can express certain vulnerabilities. I think we’re living in the age of anxiety, which is both the result of uncertainty and the space in which we can begin to understand ourselves as vulnerable and be honest about that vulnerability as humans.”
Perhaps as a way to confront existential uncertainty, Johnson’s practice is driven by an almost obsessive desire to arrest the flow of time by constructing symbolic anchors. Acting as a contemporary archaeologist, he gathers cultural and symbolic remnants, arranging them on shelves that both protect and elevate, treating them as historical documents and spiritual instruments alike. These assemblages, which often resemble altars, merge vernacular objects with spiritual and cultural artifacts, becoming sites for personal ritual or attempts to trace an inheritance or legacy that might guide the search for meaning. Johnson describes these works as ‘personal archives’: accumulations of tools that have helped him make sense of the world, engaging both body and mind in crafting poetic responses to lived experience.
Throughout Johnson’s oeuvre, a recurring constellation of materials reappears: black soap, shea butter, glass, ceramic, books, plants and vinyl albums. These elements form a personal toolkit, a symbolic lexicon of signs and references that Johnson offers up for open-ended interpretation.
Driven by archival impulse, these works reflect a compulsion to gather and house what Johnson calls “soulful” objects. They function simultaneously as witnesses and vessels, anchoring the artist’s search for meaning through their dual roles as signifiers and ideas. Whether arranged on shelves, melted, painted, marked or reshaped, they are activated into discourse through both placement and transformation. “I think a lot about the things that are domestic and close to me, and the type of employability with objects and materials,” he explained. “I think of them as collaborators; they have symbolic autonomy on their own, but they can also be ‘employed,’ participating in the process of building a narrative.”
The fullest realization of this material language comes in Sanguine (2025), a major installation occupying the museum’s uppermost level. This monumental metal armature serves as both a house of creativity and a dynamic container for ideas, materials and even life itself. Here, familiar objects—books, ceramics, plants and more—coalesce into an index of Johnson’s practice, exploring the limitless potential of meaning through layering, juxtaposition and recombination.
This personal constellation of meaning extends beyond the structure of the shelves, expanding into an immersive installation of plants, books and symbolic presences suspended from the top of the rotunda. In transforming the Guggenheim’s iconic spiral into a lush, hanging garden, Johnson creates a space that suggests a continuum between the atomic, physical fabric of reality and the realm of the collective unconscious.
Ultimately, Johnson embraces plurality, acknowledging a reality in perpetual flux, where meaning resides not in definitive answers but in a spectrum of possible interpretations and hypotheses. “I think I’m following the path that allows me to make honest progress—to be simple, vulnerable and playful, while I continue to experiment,” he reflected. Despite the many turns Johnson’s work has taken over time—and across subjects, ideological concerns, media and themes—what emerges from this survey is the remarkable consistency of his vision over three decades, which the artist himself acknowledges. “The coherence might not be in terms of materials or aesthetics, but emotionally and intellectually, the work has maintained its ambition and its curiosity, and a genuine enthusiasm for exploration and experimentation.” For him, art is a way to understand the world, even if it cannot heal its pain or resolve its challenges. “I’m not saying it’s a way to cure the world, a solution for problems, but it’s a tool to open and confront fundamental questions.”
“Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers” is on view at the Guggenheim in New York through January 18, 2025.