Passing Down

RJ: Julius, do you want to ask a question about this?

Julius Johnson: Yeah, how different was Ohio from Tennessee? What do you remember?

JJ: Well, the main difference for a five-year-old was that no one understood the language I was speaking. I mean, it was like I was unintelligible to people in Ohio.

Julius: Why?

JJ: Because of my accent, really a double accent, a Southern accent, and then the Black accent. I’d say something and people would say, “What’d you say?” All the time. All I remember is: “What?!” and “Excuse me?” I started trying to speak up because I thought I was talking too softly, but it wasn’t that. Eventually I was old enough to realize that part of what was happening is that white people, mostly white people, just wanted me to repeat myself because they had that power and authority over me. When I finally went to school, it was like I was learning a different language. We didn’t speak that language in my house or in my neighborhood. I struggled for a while, trying to be accepted. It was like a foreign place to me. I felt like I was there but wasn’t really there.

RJ: I’ve heard so many of these stories from you, since I was so young, that they really feel like they’re a part of me. And oral history, particularly in Black families, is really the most familiar and pronounced history we have. So I know these stories quite well. It’s interesting to think about how we didn’t grow up near your brothers and sisters, even after the whole family was in the Midwest, the entire family migrating to Youngstown, Ohio, and to date all of them still living in Youngstown. You were the only member of the family who moved away, to Illinois. And so I didn’t grow up like a lot of people with big families do, in close proximity to aunts and uncles and cousins. It wasn’t isolating, exactly, but it was a different experience. With you, and with Mom, we kind of had this family unit of our own that was pretty small and that became very close. What do you remember about thinking that I might have artistic inclinations when I was young?

JJ: I first started to understand that you had any interest in art, Rashid, when I was learning about astrology, and in astrology they say Libra, which is your sign, has a lot of artistic abilities. And since you and I have the same birthday, in a sense I was learning about myself, too. And so I said, “Hmm, I’m going to test that.” Around that time, when you were little, I actually made a painting, my first piece of art, a four-by-eight piece, oil on canvas. I had also studied photography when I was in the service and did darkroom work, too, so I decided I wanted to paint something in black and white, because I had a sense of black and white. In Munich, when I was in the army, I was exposed for the first time to art museums and art in churches and historical installations that dealt with the Holocaust, which I’d visit when I was off duty. I began to understand for the first time the nature of expression through art and how important it’s been to human life. Had art not existed, we wouldn’t know so many things about so much of our past. Drawings on the walls of caves thousands of years ago tell us what we were hunting, what we were eating, how we thought, you know? Those drawings still help us understand ourselves.

Being in Europe like that was very important to me at the time. I saw things I couldn’t have seen any other way. And it made me think about myself differently. Pretty early on, you did those photographic pieces about homeless men you met on the streets of Chicago. That one called Jonathan’s Hands shows a man with his hands covering his face. At least a part of the experience of seeing that work was to think: “That’s how people want me to feel about myself, ashamed of myself.” But the more important part was me thinking: “Wait a minute. The image that we have in our heads of homeless people is of people who don’t have any hope or dignity, people who don’t take care of themselves.” And that’s not what you did with those pictures, that series called Seeing in the Dark. You showed people in all their humanity. You brought those men to life.

RJ: That body of work was really a formative one for me. I had moved from Evanston, Illinois, where I’d grown up, to downtown Chicago. That move came with a lot more exposure to people who were unhoused, people in different states of a housing crisis in their lives. And I thought a lot about these men, mostly Black men, and their experience in opposition to mine. I grew up in a middle-class home. Mom was a professor. You had a small business. I was from a divorced family, but family life was always very stable. You lived a block away from us during my whole childhood. Doing that series, I started to question my own agency and opportunity and privilege in a different way than I’d expected. Also, because I shared race with the folks I’d been photographing, I encountered an immediate assumption in the art world that I must have some shared experience with the subjects I was photographing—that I was somehow sharing some of my own pain, had some kinship with those men. And that made me realize, for the first time in a serious way, how easily we flatten people’s experience based on easy assumptions. I remember thinking to myself, “The coalitions that we build via race in this country are so significant and strong that class and agency and opportunity and privilege barely penetrate the conversation enough to recognize the vast differences between people.” And it continues to inform how I articulate positions in my work and understand my intentions. I wish I could say that I had the predictive skills at age nineteen to know how those photographs were going to be flattened into a read based mostly around race that I didn’t expect. It was a huge learning experience for me. I would even say it was shocking. And it taught me to ask a lot more questions of the things around me.

JJ: It was interesting to watch how intensely you questioned things when you were growing up. You always did.

RJ: In what way?

JJ: When you were two years old, I took you to spend time with me in the electronics shop, and there were thousands of little things in there, electronic parts, radios, televisions, gadgets. And you would say: “Dad, what’s that?” and I’d explain what it was. And you’d say: “What’s this?” And I’d explain and explain. You’d ask a thousand questions. You never got tired of it. You were curious about everything. You’d tell me that you wanted to be like me when you grew up, to have a shop like mine. And I thought, “Maybe, but let’s be careful and let him figure out what he really wants to be.” I was always a very strong believer in letting children find their own way. I didn’t want to impose my own desires for them on them. That’s how you end up with unhappy people. One thing I knew about both you and your brother was that when you were interested in something, you spared no amount of time and effort wanting to know everything about it. With sports, for example. Both of you could have been sports announcers.

RJ: It’s really one of the things that led me to have the tools to know so many things about art and art history. It started with sports and statistics. I was the kind of fan who would check the paper every day to find out how, you know, the shortstop for the Cubs was doing, what his batting average was. Then I’d watch the game on television and convert the batting average in real time in my head as he came up to the plate. I would figure out other advanced sports statistics. I was really into the numbers, particularly in baseball. I knew everything.

JJ: And you loved it so much that you wanted to be a professional baseball player. Which is just about as hard to be successful at as being a professional artist. The odds are very long in both professions. Julius, you’re a very good basketball player.

Julius: Yeah, I love basketball and I love science. Also art, but I think basketball and science top those right now. I love being on the basketball travel team.

JJ: Well, you have a great shooting eye. And a quick first step.

RJ: Your mother’s side of the family and your grandfather here, both are math and science people. So it’s not unusual that you’re interested in those things, I think. I was less of a math and science person, but I was actually always pretty good at them. I’ve always been very pragmatic that way.

JJ: I think you started working first with photography because of that pragmatic sense. That it was something you wanted to explore and understand.

RJ: As a teenager, there were those years I started doing lots of jobs to earn money. At around fifteen, I started working bagging groceries, shoveling snow, cutting people’s grass. Then I got that job working for a wedding photographer, assisting him. And I actually just liked all the material that a photographer was involved with. I liked the click of the shutter. I liked that a photographer was mobile and moving around, not stationary or stagnant, which was interesting. Dad, you had a bunch of photographs that you used to keep in my bedroom, remember? They were old images from Vietnam that you’d taken and kept in a shoebox in my closet. I used to pull them down and look at them. They weren’t tragic or scary images. They weren’t war pictures. Just soldiers and other people doing things. Lots of pictures of palm trees and buildings. I loved those pictures. They were just beautiful nostalgic things. Mom also had cameras around. She had an old Canon A-1, and that’s when they used to have really beautiful, ornate camera straps. They were just wonderful as objects. Really, for me, so much of the material culture around your shop and Mom's house and office were important to me. You both had a lot of books around. Mom had all these complicated titles that felt like questions that I would one day have to ask or answer. I would look at a book like, for example, Harold Cruses’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, from 1967, and know that I had to figure out what that was about. And then I’d be in your shop, which was filled with technical books, really complex pieces of electronics. It was a place where physical things got made, got fixed. I have a studio, and when I work in it as an artist, it doesn’t feel so dissimilar to the shop. It’s where we make things, at the end of the day. Artists are workers. We’re people invested in labor.

JJ: In my profession, there were people whose work was like a Volkswagen, which is pretty good. And then there were Rolls-Royces. I knew which one I was going to be. I do that quality of work. I was never interested in lesser. I wanted to do special, custom, top-notch work because there’s just a pride and satisfaction in making something. I’ve watched your work evolve, Rashid, and I see things like attention to certain kinds of detail that deepens as you get older.

Julius: When I’m in your studio, it’s always cool to me to see how you can have an idea and then just make it into something. I’ve also learned that when you look at a work of art, especially a painting, you kind of have to look inside it to figure out what you think. You have to look at it for a long time to get inside it.

JJ: It’s made me happy that you were able to do what you wanted to do in the art world. For me, where I was when you were young, there was always the knowledge that I had to have a check at the end of the month. Rent, groceries, expenses for a family. It had to be consistent and I knew it.

RJ: Well, your shop was important to me. I think about the physical and also the conceptual things I got from it. The use of CB radios as a sculptural material, for example. Not many people remember CB radios now, but they were such a huge thing in the ‘70s and ‘80s, before personal computers and cell phones. For me the interesting thing about the CB was the idea of calling out into the world and the potential anonymity of it. It was a proto-internet space, where you could reach people and your identity wasn’t necessarily the first thing that was known. And communities were created through it, through people talking and connecting thousands of miles apart. When you got on a CB radio, you were opening yourself up to a kind of communication that you wouldn’t have otherwise been able to have. I loved that. And early on I also loved the look of the radios as objects, in a nostalgic way. In the early work, I was using lots of iconography from my childhood, because it was what I knew.

JJ: I remember that for a lot of years when you were starting out, you were really scrapping to make ends meet.

RJ: Yeah, I mean, I had some success right from the beginning. I had work purchased by the Art Institute. I had a show in Chicago when I was about twenty, photographs that sold out. I started showing with a gallery. But there was an extended period of time when all of that attention did not necessarily mean resources. I had a critical embrace but I was still broke, after moving to New York. And that went into my thirties. I had to borrow money. But I was always very, very focused. There was never really a moment when I thought I was going to try something else. It was art or nothing. Even in school, I had that determination. I didn’t get good grades in drawing. I just didn’t draw things like they wanted me to, I guess. But I kept at it with art classes. I was invested, focused. I loved drawing. I loved doodling. I loved messing around. I got into graffiti early and that was a big part of my story, too, before photography.

JJ: You were always really good from the beginning at talking about what you were doing, presenting yourself and the work.

RJ: To be honest, I didn’t always necessarily want to. But the way the art world works today, there are more questions or at least more demand to hear answers from the artist about the why. And that why extends to “why you?” There are so many of us out here making art, trying to say something, trying to be successful, making pictures and sculptures and film, all of us having had access to privileged educations. And it’s a fair question for people to ask: Why do we need your voice amplified? Why the hell should we be paying attention to your contribution? Why should you be successful? When I talk about my work, part of my intention has also just been to be generous. Not only generous with the audience that is already invested in my work or the ideas that I’ve presented, but an audience that has yet to be introduced to it. And there’s also the issue I talked about earlier, that there are too many simplistic assumptions made about the work of artists of color. So, I think part of what I’ve been interested in doing is making clear, when I can, what my intentions for my work are.

JJ: The longer I see you make work, the more I think about the thing I talked about earlier, about prehistoric art in the caves, how art captures a time in history in ways other things don’t. I think a lot of your work will show what being Black during your time was like, at least one version of it.

RJ: From the beginning, I wanted to articulate my individual experience as a Black man.

JJ: It’s funny thinking about what we think we are and what we think we’re doing and how that all plays out in the real world. Sitting here with you and Julius, I think about what we say as parents. What we think really sticks with our kids. And how it’s almost impossible to know what it is that you say or do that makes a difference, even with a parent’s best intentions.

RJ: [Laughs.] Right. The thing you do that they remember you being really bad at is probably the thing you thought you did well—you thought you crushed it. And the thing you don’t even remember saying is the thing that makes a huge difference in their lives. How do you think I’m doing, Julius?

Julius: Well, my friends think you’re cool, so that’s nice. [Laughs.] Not everybody has a dad that kids think is cool.

RJ: [Laughs.] Okay, I’ll take that! I think about what Mom did and what you did, Dad. And I’m pretty OK as a human being. So maybe if I just do as well as that as a parent, I’m alright. I’m not overthinking it.

JJ: What do you think having a big retrospective is going to do to your head? Seeing all your work over the years together like that in one place?

RJ: Going back over all my work, especially early work, there are moments when I see pieces that were pledging allegiance to an idea or praying at a temple that I don’t necessarily know is still brick and mortar anymore. You know what I mean? I guess the basic thing that having a survey is doing for me is making me realize I don’t always have to tell the same story. I’m allowed to contradict myself. I’m not only allowed to, but I expect myself to contradict myself. If I’m the same man at fifty that I was at twenty-five, there’s something really wrong. I want my work to reflect where I am at different stages in my life in an honest way.

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“Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers” opens at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York on April 18 and remains on view through January 18, 2026.

Rashid Johnson’s multidisciplinary practice includes sculpture, painting, drawing, filmmaking and installation. Johnson’s work is known for its narrative embedding of a range of everyday materials and objects, often associated with his childhood and frequently referencing aspects of history and cultural identity.