Rashid Johnson
b. 1977
Rashid Johnson was born in Chicago in 1977. He received a BFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago (2000) and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2005), where he became interested in critical theory through the study of film, video, and new media under artist Gregg Bordowitz. Working across the disciplines of painting, sculpture, photography, and video, Johnson explores his personal past and identity within the larger context of African American intellectual and creative history. In 2001 Johnson presented a series of documentary photographs of Chicago’s African American homeless population in the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Freestyle exhibition, after which his practice broadened to encompass conceptual abstraction, mark making, and the constructed object. Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos (2008) is an enlarged sculpture of the crosshairs of a riflescope. The work draws its title from a 1988 song by hip-hop group Public Enemy, who use a rendering of crosshairs in their logo. Through form, scale, and reference, the work addresses issues concerning the privatized prison system and its dependence on the incarceration of black men. In his video The New Black…
Films