Rashid Johnson’s Soul Searching Through Time
To have your past, present, and future selves greet the world at parity is the kind of vulnerability that artist Rashid Johnson has been nurturing for nearly 30 years. Surveying […] The post Rashid Johnson’s Soul Searching Through Time appeared first on Essence.
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Photo Credit: Sydney Shaw 
By Brianna J. Heath ·Updated November 26, 2025 < /> Getting your Trinity Audio player ready… To have your past, present, and future selves greet the world at parity is the kind of vulnerability that artist Rashid Johnson has been nurturing for nearly 30 years. Surveying personal and collective histories, his prolific practice reveals that maybe time is a map to our souls, harnessing the marks of our existence to lead us back to ourselves. His interior disarmament is a humble offering of love, em>Guggenheim retrospective, A Poem For Deep Thinkers, but his oeuvre in its entirety.
As the son of an African History professor, Johnson received a form of intellectual inheritance where critical engagement was a requirement in his rearing and, to a degree, a self-imposed obligation as he sought to forge his own artisticsrc="https://www.essence.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Johnson-Untitled-Anxious-Audience-2019.tif" alt="Rashid Johnson’s Soul Searching Through Time" width="400" />Untitled Anxious Audience, 2019
“Spirituality and our relationship to it is inherently a very expansive critical space and it doesn’t come at the expense of intellectual activation,” he tells ESSENCE. “It actually is an incredible assistant to it.” Whether it’s his Anxious Audience (2019) peering across the rotunda, transfixed on a young Johnson ten years their junior in Self-Portrait with My Hair Parted Like Fredrick Douglas (2003), or Bruise (2021) and God (2023) paintings extending a gestural interpretation of his psyche, implications of the soul are ever-present in his work.
Bruise Painting “Honeysuckle Rose”, 2021 Rather than evade his innermost uncertainties, Johnson welcomes them as references in his almost alchemical interrogation of ideas, materials, and interiority. In some ways, the artist has made consciousness his most salient subject. He attributes these insights to a form of ‘intellectual prayer’ that reveals the power of quiet that can only be found within.
God Painting “The Spirit”, 2023 Often interrogating themes of existential liminality, be it domestic, psychological, or emotional, his work is an invitation into his personhood with a visual language that functions as both intellectual proclamation and spiritual confession. As much as he prompts temporal reflection onto himself and his identity, he poses the question right back to the viewer, his artistic witness: Now that I’ve shown you myself, look beyond me and ask, ‘How do I see myself?’ and more importantly, ‘What is the self?’
Ascending the Guggenheim’s spiral architecture, these questions do not go unanswered as his vulnerability is on full display. We meander through time, sojourning with the Rashid Johnson of 1998, 2012 and 2025—along with every version in between. They are all in conversation with each other and with us, shepherded by the discourses that guided him in his self-discovery. Black thought encompassed in history, art, literature, and theory becomes a conduit to the multiplicity of his interiority and Blackness as a whole.
Untitled (Shea Butter Table), 2016 “One thing you get to experience is where I was at different stages,” the artist shares. “Often what you are seeing are allusions to the things I’m actually reading, recognition of the records that I’m listening to, the materials that I’m being introduced to that I think are really prescient in unpacking where I am at in those particular moments.” Whether it’s hisdecoding="async" src="https://www.essence.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Johnson-The-Crisis-of-the-Negro-Intellectual-scaled.jpg" alt="Rashid Johnson’s Soul Searching Through Time" width="400" height="400" />The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (The Power of Healing), 2008
For Johnson, introspection parallels the rigor and stamina akin to cultivating his artistic craft with these meditations on interiority most illuminated through movement and self-care. He shares, “I often prioritize how I feel and the different ways that I can kind of change my experience through the conditions that I expose my body to.” The artist has been a frequent visitor to the Russian & Turkish Baths for over a decade, describing the space as a sanctuary for safety and equanimity. Recently, hesrc="https://www.essence.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Johnson-Sanguine-2024-still-01.tif" alt="Rashid Johnson’s Soul Searching Through Time" width="400" />Sanguine, 2024 (still 01)
Johnson speaks of his deep reverence for the enduring legacy of artists, creators, and educators who “get to add something to this quilt… this expansive, long web of humanity and the human condition, but also recognize how small we are in the history of the world,” noting that his preeminent obligation as an artist is to “lay out the ideas, the things that are interesting to [me] both aesthetically and critically, and then let the audience consume from that buffet.”
As he bestows his intellectual and artistic concerns to his viewers, he is most cognizant of his son. “For me, fatherhood has expanded my understanding of the world more than anything else,” he says. “It has helped me understand how to be a better artist.” That same enthusiasm for all that he strives to impart upon his son—safety, support, care, and intellectual nurturance—are similar to the generous evocations present in his public work.
With time as his circuitous anchor, Rashid Johnson’s prevailing obligation is to be present. Soul-searching within himself and the collective is in service of a long lineage of critical discourse where his mark is one of unapologetic vulnerability and reciprocity.
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