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Encircled by three decades’ worth of his artworks in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s iconic rotunda, Rashid Johnson feels as if he’s at a family reunion. “I always think of art as objects that you birthed as an artist,” he tells Vogue ahead of “Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers” (through January 18, 2026), his first solo presentation at the New York institution. With more than 90 works, the mid-career traveling survey is also his largest exhibition to date. “When the artworks travel for an exhibition like this, it’s like you’re a parent who gave away your children, and they’ve come back to find you. In some ways, it’s really rewarding, and in other ways, it’s complicated.”
Much of Johnson’s œuvre—and the experience of viewing it—could be described similarly. Never one to shy away from his emotions, the Chicago-born, New York–based artist is known for his deeply introspective and sensitive work, in which he confronts—and attempts to address—struggles both personal and universal. For example, in his famed Anxious Men series, which he began 10 years ago, the starting point was a grid of white bathroom tiles, evoking the tiled bathhouses he’d frequent in Chicago as a source of community and healing. Onto those tiles, Johnson applied a mixture of black soap and wax, into which he carved his now-signature frenzied figures, reflecting his anxiety around Black masculinity and parenthood. Similarly, the broken mirrors in Johnson’s Broken Men series literalize the self-reflection he coaxes from both himself and the viewer. In these works, artmaking itself becomes a vehicle for catharsis.
Looking at one of the earliest pieces in the Guggenheim exhibition—Mudcloth (2001), part of a series that saw Johnson scatter materials stereotypically associated with Black culture (in this case, chicken bones) onto photosensitized paper to emulate the 19th-century photogram process—Johnson feels nostalgic.
“I remember the action of making it, where I was, and the desperation and ambition I felt. And being reunited with it, I can see how much of my more recent work is connected to it,” the artist says. “It’s really rewarding to know that although I’ve grown and am in a very different time in my life, those early works continue to have a substantive position and are still serious objects to me.”
Opting to “push and pull back from a set chronology,” as the artist describes it, the show’s installation in the Guggenheim’s rotunda offers a fascinating view into Johnson’s mind. The magic of Frank Lloyd Wright’s genius design is its constant sense of surprise—an effect redoubled by the work of an artist like Johnson, who moves so fluidly between media. Spray-painted text canvases, sculptural installations incorporating black soap and shea butter—grooming products closely connected to the African diasporic community—and videos unfold around every corner, illustrating the breadth of Johnson’s practice, both conceptually and materially.
Even more than suiting the way his mind works—“I often argue that we are too limiting in the way that we define ‘medium,’” Johnson reflects. “Consciousness can be a medium”—taking an expansive, changeable approach to form and discipline was simply what was done as Johnson was starting out. “When I first came into art in the mid-’90s, it was almost perfunctory that you would be experimenting with other media, whether it be photography, film, performance, or installation,” he says.
That idea is most prominent in the Guggenheim show at the top of the rotunda, where Sanguine—a sprawling, site-specific installation composed of gridded steel structures with live potted plants, books by influential Black authors (one of numerous testaments to Johnson’s love of literature in the exhibition, which takes its name from a poem by Amiri Baraka), and videos—is mounted. The final Sanguine structure houses a film of the same name, which explores Johnson’s relationship with his father and son. As part of the installation, plants—including full-sized palm trees—are suspended from the Guggenheim’s ceiling, appearing to float in mid-air.
“We hadn’t seen these grand gestures since before the height of the COVID pandemic, so we’re all so excited to have the museum return to form as a building that inspires artists to take risks and play with the architecture,” says Naomi Beckwith, deputy director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Beckwith co-curated “A Poem for Deep Thinkers” with Andrea Karnes, interim director and chief curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, where the exhibition will be on view from March 8 through October 4, 2026, before traveling to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Beckwith continues, “Rashid Johnson’s particular intervention is a wonderful echo of Frank Lloyd Wright’s desire to always have living plants in the building. Like Wright, Rashid believes that a museum is a living, breathing entity that can house vivacity and life—not just still objects.”
Hidden among Sanguine’s vegetation is a piano, which will be activated with performances throughout the exhibition’s run. A robust series of performances and public programs (cultural partners include the Academy of American Poets and Harlem School of the Arts) will also take place on a stage that Johnson designed for the rotunda floor.
“I’ve thought a lot in my work about platforming. I’ve had many opportunities to have my voice amplified as an artist, and I really like the idea that you can create a stage for people in different communities to have a voice,” says Johnson. In 2022, for example, he presented a participatory installation called Stage at MoMA PS1 that drew on the history of the microphone as a tool for protest and public oratory. “I see this as an opportunity for me to learn from them and understand how other people are seeing the world.” (A former member of the Guggenheim’s board of trustees, Johnson has also been a supporter and funder of the museum’s internship program.)
With so much to ponder in his works, as well as in future performances, the artist urges visitors to return to the exhibition. “Just give me two days,” he says. “Two visits.”
“Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers” is on vew at the Guggenheim through January 18.