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- [00:00]
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- [00:31]
Alison Stewart
This is all all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Today we're talking about art to celebrate the culmination of our 100 pieces of art series. 10 experts came on the show to share their top 10 don't miss works of art in the City. You can listen to all of those conversations and see the full list of 100 suggestions and where to see them at wnyc.org art100 thank you to Sarah Douglas, Editor in Chief of Art News Jerry Saltz, art critic for Vulture Jackson Arne, former New Yorker art critic artist Glenn Ligon Thelma golden, director and Chief Curator at the Studio Museum of Harlem Hirag Vartanian, Editor in chief and co founder of hyperallergic Wilheinrich New York Times art critic Jaime Rojo and Steven Harrington, co founders of the group Brooklyn Street Art Eileen Jang Lynch, Bronx Museum Director of Curatorial Programs and Sarah Cho, Assistant Curator of the Queen's Museum. We put together a cheat sheet of a few of their suggestions. Go to our Instagram to see it. Olivenyc so if you find yourself in the Met or at the Bronx Museum, you know what to look for.
- [01:39]
Rasheed Johnson
And if you go to a museum.
- [01:40]
Alison Stewart
Take a picture of you with some.
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Rasheed Johnson
Art and send it to us via Instagram.
- [01:45]
Alison Stewart
We will regram you.
- [01:47]
Rasheed Johnson
This city has some of the world's best offering for art lovers, including what's.
- [01:52]
Alison Stewart
Happening now at the Guggenheim.
- [02:03]
Rasheed Johnson
If you go to the Guggenheim between now and January, you'll find the museum's entire rotunda occupied by an exhibition called Rasheed A Poem for Deep Thinkers. You'll see work from as early as 1998 when Johnson photographed unhoused black men in his home city of Chicago for his Seeing in the Dark series, to more recent pieces like his Soul Painting series and even work that was newly created this year. And in addition to photographs and paintings, you can also see Johnson's works of mosaic, sculpture and film. I talked with Rasheed Johnson about his Guggenheim show back in April when it opened alongside Naomi Beckwith, Guggenheim Deputy director and chief Curator. I started by asking Johnson what he meant when he told Harper's Bazaar that a mid career survey like this is, quote, a dangerous game for artists.
- [02:59]
Naomi Beckwith
I guess I was referencing when I was discussing the danger of it is that it often can feel like a stopping point for an artist. There's this moment of reflection that's born of a mid career survey or something that people often refer to as a mid career retrospective, where you just are forced to, which is different than almost any other profession, to stop, put your pencils down and look at what you did when you were in your early 20s. And anyone who would be facing that kind of obstacle can imagine what it would look like to look at an earlier version of yourself or a less evolved version of yourself and then have that platformed kind of equally to some degree with your more evolved self to some. So that that idea of that kind of equal footing, equal platforming of different versions of your, of your evolution is complicated and in a lot of ways dangerous.
- [04:00]
Alison Stewart
How is it a concern for you as a curator when you're looking at an artist's mid career?
- [04:08]
Naomi Beckwith
Well, the first thing I would say is we were very careful to use the word survey, which is to say a retrospective implies an end. And we wanted to say this is not the end. This is really the midpoint. Rashid is young. God willing, he'll be around for quite some time. And I think part of my job, as Rashid already alluded to, was to allow him to be kind to the earlier self and really trust the person who had ideas. They may be, in your words, less evolved, but they were strong and they were speaking to something in the moment. And so for me, the concern was less about making sure everything stood up to each other in terms of strength, but also the question of how do we talk about what was happening during Rashid's life 20, 25 years ago, what was happening in the art world 20, 25 years ago, and how do we make co some of the things that the art was reacting to and how do we make cogent some of the grains of ideas that were there during the younger days that are still here with Rashid's work in mind now, when.
- [05:09]
Rasheed Johnson
You decided we're going to do this, we're going to make this survey, what.
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Alison Stewart
Was your first step?
- [05:16]
Naomi Beckwith
Well, the first step was really to start the process of looking back. And Naomi and I sat down and Naomi and I are lucky to have been friends, friends for many, many years and have worked together for many, many years through several different exhibitions and different stages in our careers. So Naomi had the really kind of, I think, prescient and thoughtful idea that we should put a real emphasis on how the catalog functions, which allowed us to gather images, gather Ideas and gather different voices to. To illustrate through words some of the ideas that were really present in the work. So we really started with the idea of how do you make a great book? And from there we felt like the exhibition would evolve.
- [06:05]
Rasheed Johnson
As you said, you've been friends forever a while. When you first encountered Rachid's work, what struck you the most?
- [06:14]
Naomi Beckwith
Oh, that's a really interesting question, because I have to say, I. I think I don't remember so much the first time seeing Rashid's work. I remember meeting Rashid mostly for the first time, though. I know I'd seen the work already, but I think by the time we met, his star was already ascending. So in many ways, he was already becoming a mythical figure. And I almost hate to say it, but there was. There was a little hateration already in the world. There was a sense that Rashid was going to be this muy macho man, that once he opens the door, this studio, he was gonna answer the door basically topless, rubbing shea butter all over his chest. Right. I don't know if you knew this. This was circulating, but that's. That was the reality of the rumors, that is. And I just remember our first studio visit being incredible, which had already followed from some amazing conversations where we'd already had, I think, a similar sensibility of how art could be functioning even in our 20s. I want to add one note, too, about the process. One thing Rashid and I did was decide to step aside, step apart, and make an ideal checklist. If there were works that you should think should be in the show, put it on the list. And then we compared the list, and they were almost identical. And I think that was already a very good sign about the process.
- [07:34]
Very true.
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Rasheed Johnson
Rasheed, how did you want to use the Rotunda?
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Naomi Beckwith
The Rotunda is a fascinating space and something that people, when you ask them their thoughts, will always tell you that it's incredibly complicated. And so they often approach it with this. This idea that there's this enormous obstacle born of Wright's vision for the building. Sometimes the ceilings are low, everything in the building is crooked. You can see almost every angle of the building from almost every angle of the building. So inherently, it's feels complicated, but the thing that I'm really attracted to in that building and in other spaces as well, is we've started the process of making the artist's job easy through these big white cubes. And it's not to blame the architects who have kind of flattened the earth for the artists, but it's not. And it doesn't have to be that easy. You know, sometimes artists are at their best when they're facing strange angles and decorative elements and, you know, and things that seem inherently challenging. This building is not a building you want to approach with a tape measure. It's a building you want to approach kind of with a more soulful understanding of how you can occupy it and how your work kind of lives and sings in the space. And you have to really visit it. You have to be very present for it if you want to make an exhibition that I think is successful.
- [09:03]
Alison Stewart
Why do you think Rashid's work works in the Rotunda?
- [09:07]
Naomi Beckwith
Well, I think, first of all, it's because Rashid was so dedicated to dancing with the architecture. I mean, Rashid walked from his home downtown every Sunday to the building for almost two years and really looked at the space, felt the space with his body, watched how people occupied the space and looked their behavior through the building. And so that was important, his kind of understanding that you really have to work with the work, what the building offers, rather than push against it. But the second thing is there's a real sensibility that both Frank Lloyd Wright and Rashid hold, which is they believe in life inside of architecture, life inside of structure. So, as you mentioned before already, Alison, there's just a beautiful hanging garden in the exhibition. And when Wright built the building, he said he always wanted living plants inside of the building. He always wanted to think about this entire building as a kind of terrarium, a place for vivacity.
- [10:07]
Alison Stewart
I'm speaking with Rasheed Johnson and Naomi Beckwith. We are talking about the new survey of Johnson's work at the Guggenheim. It's called Rasheed A Poem for Deep Thinkers. Before we even enter the museum, there's an outdoor sculpture called Black Steel in.
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Rasheed Johnson
The Hour of chaos from 2008.
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Alison Stewart
Why did you want people to engage.
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Rasheed Johnson
With that statue before they go inside the building?
- [10:32]
Naomi Beckwith
This is an interesting work, Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos, because it's one that pretty much sets the stage for, I think, how Rashid works as an artist, which is being able to interweave several references all at once. So for those people who will recognize the symbol visually, it's basically a target outside looks like the image you would see if you were looking through a gun scope. And many people see that and stop there and really imagine the work is somehow a kind of gesture around a commentary on violence, or maybe even violence against African American men. But those who may recognize the title or even the visual object may also see that it's a reference to Public Enemy So you have this layer of referencing hip hop, and hip hop itself is usually put together through a series of interwoven references. And the second level reference, of course, is that Chuck D, the founder of Public Enemy, was a graphic designer. And having done many books now. And for those who work in publishing, they may recognize, if you look at the proofs on the edges are trim lines. And the symbol where you should trim is that target. So there's then the second level of reference to sort of printing culture, visual culture. And then, of course, lastly, if you, like me, are an art nerd, generally your first reference in thinking about a target is Jasper Johns. So thinking through so many layers of referential points is, I think, the gift of Rashid's work. And I wanted people to take that with them as they walk through the building.
- [12:09]
Rasheed Johnson
You brought up music. I'm going in there. There's Al Green, there's Public Enemy, there's.
- [12:14]
Tribe Funkadelic, George Clinton.
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How is music a part of your practice? How is it a part of your. Well, part of your life?
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Naomi Beckwith
Music is such an enormous part of my life, and it's really kind of the background of everything that I've ever done to reference, again, the sculpture that's in the front of the museum, which is a reference to the song Black Seal in the Hour of Chaos. You know, the first time I heard Public Enemy, I was with my brother, and we were driving down the street, and he had just gotten his driver's license. My brother's, you know, many years older than me. He had just got his driver's license, and he was playing Public Enemy. And I asked him, what is this? Because it was just so. It had just so blown my mind. And he said, public interview. But what I heard, public interview. What I heard was public interview. And I thought, oh, my God, public interviews are incredible. You know, I thought these.
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Rasheed Johnson
This is public radio.
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It's awesome.
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Naomi Beckwith
Yes, it's amazing to be here today. And I'm gonna start my rap career. No, I won't. But that idea that music can become an anthem for how you live and is not necessarily only the background of your experience, but also kind of foregrounds your experience and lead you down different pathways. I mean, hip hop in a lot of ways led me to jazz, and in some ways, jazz led me to rhythm and blues. And then some of that led me to some of the kind of critical engagement that happens in my work. Louis Armstrong led me to some of the Negritude poets, led me to some kind of post colonial African writers and thinkers like Ame Cesaire and a number of other things. So it's just amazing how kind of interwoven it is to the fabric of our lives and experience and is really the kind of illustrative soundtrack for my life and my story.
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Rasheed Johnson
The title of the show, A Poem.
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For Deep Thinkers, I believe it's Amiri Baraka.
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Naomi Beckwith
Yes, it is.
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Rasheed Johnson
Why was that poem. Why was a poem by Amiri Baraka meaningful to you?
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Naomi Beckwith
Baraka is someone I've thought about for many years, and he's someone that even my mother would read poems by to me when I was a young boy. In particular, a book called the Dead Lecturer. And Amiri Baraka is just a fascinating man through the transitions that he experienced in his life. I mean, going from Leroy Jones previously to Amiri Baraka. I often joke that Leroy Jones will never die because there's never going to be a gravestone or an obituary for Leroy Jones. So this idea of kind of transition and growth and development and radical change and transgressive radical change and what that looks like and what that feels like. And so Naomi and I, in looking at the work and thinking about what the exhibition did and what its ambitions were, kind of recognized that this particular poem, a Poem for Deep Thinkers, kind of captures the two ness of my project. So one being the idea of poetry and the symbol of poetry and the surreal kind of nature of poetry and the fluidity that we often associate with it, but also the idea of making a space for deep thinkers and a space for contemplation. And so my work oftentimes kind of navigates that two ness, that space of the ethereal or the aesthetic or the beautiful or the complicated. But at the same time, ideally, it makes space for you to kind of think critically and to have things to unpack and explore throughout the process.
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Alison Stewart
It's interesting.
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Rasheed Johnson
In the first gallery off of the Rotunda, there's like a little. It's like a tangent, a little sidebar. What are you trying to do in that first gallery? I was curious because there's so many different kinds of artwork in this one area.
- [16:06]
Naomi Beckwith
Yes, it's a show within a show in many ways, and almost a Whitman sampler. So like Untitled on the bottom floor, it's also a way to kind of walk through these gestures and materials that Rashid has used. There is his early work with spray paint, which is a great mix of that complex of hip hop culture meets painting practice and text work. There is a large scale work on bathroom tiles. The anxious audience, which also holds another popular symbol for Rashid, these sort of cartoonish figures called the Anxious Men. Those are made with black wax and soap. So again, there's a sample of another material that's very important to Rashid. Black soap, along with shea butter, have been sort of constants in the practice. Big bronze work, large scale bronze work that look really modeled and handled and pushed against with Rashid's hands are there. And in that sampler we also wanted to think about maybe this theme of transcendence, of change, of moving into a more spiritual realm. The very first work that you see, even before you go into that gallery, is a work called Me at the Grave of Jack Johnson, which is a little bit of a snide, you know, joke and a bit of a performance. But it already so shows Rashid thinking about legacy, the afterlife, the stories that are still with us even when people are not.
- [17:31]
Rasheed Johnson
The written word has an element in your sculpture. On different sculptures, I see different books. I see books by Frantz Fanon and Gwendolyn Brooks and Paul Beatty on all different sculptures. What is your relationship to the written word and its relationship to the visual arts?
- [17:50]
Naomi Beckwith
Yeah, I mean the written. I come from a family of academics. My mother was a professor when I was growing up of African and African American history with a kind of emphasis on post colonial feminist theory in West Africa specifically. So I grew up in a space with a lot of books. To be honest, my mother's library and the kind of ambition that it served was. Was a real influence for me early. And it's an interesting thing because early on in the process of coming across books, whether they were kind of academic or literary in nature, they were more objects to me than anything else. They were kind of signs and signifiers because I couldn't unpack the content, you know, at a young age. I'm 5, 6, 7, kind of surrounded by this. These walls of objects. And so I would often kind of pick them up and I'd feel their weight and I'd look at their titles. And of course, I wasn't reading Harold the Crisis of the Negro Intellectual when I was seven, but the idea that I would maybe be asked to acquire what was in that text at another time and kind of preparing myself at a really early stage to navigate these kind of bold objects and looking at their covers and looking at their kind of weight and presence. And as I got older, I became, you know, really a really, you know, a big reader and someone who continues to kind of pour through text, literary and critical. And I still have a real investment in philosophy. So, you know, what. And how the content has informed me is continued to push my work forward.
- [19:38]
Alison Stewart
What's one of those books that you.
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Rasheed Johnson
Tell people that they should read now?
- [19:42]
Naomi Beckwith
If you're reading something now and you want something really contemporary. Danzy Senna, Colored Television.
- [19:49]
Alison Stewart
It's so good.
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Naomi Beckwith
It's incredible.
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Alison Stewart
As a great book.
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Naomi Beckwith
Yeah, Danzi's brilliant. And that work and its relationship to a certain version of satire is unbelievable. But it also really unpacks space to think about kind of race and a certain, you know, time in a woman's life in ways that I think very few books have made space for. Because within the space of mixed race ness, I think we get to unpack kind of some of the complications of how color functions and how we transition into certain identifying characteristics and the weight and gravity that we place on certain themes and ways of seeing.
- [20:36]
Alison Stewart
If you would like people to spend an extra minute or two in front of any piece in this show, what is it today you might change. It might be a different show piece.
- [20:45]
Naomi Beckwith
Tomorrow, but today, that is a very, very difficult question. If I were thinking about one work in particular that you could kind of go to and that could synthesize the exhibition, I could not answer it because my project is very, very much kind of this. This index, you know, it's a. It's an index of everything that I've done. And I feel like if you just read one work, then you're just reading one chapter. And that's what, you know, an exhibition like this gives me the opportunity to do is to highlight the wholeness of my vision. And if you see one work, I think you have to see a second. And one of the things that I'm really hoping to do, and I know it's ambitious and in some ways absurd, is to invite people to come not once to the exhibition, but to come twice. Like, give me two days, you know, Give me two days. That's where my ambition follows, is that I want not one afternoon, I want two afternoons. And if you give me that, I think that the exhibition can be really rewarding for the viewer.
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Rasheed Johnson
I'm not giving up.
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Alison Stewart
Tell me a piece in the show that you enjoyed making.
- [21:59]
Naomi Beckwith
That's a different question. Joy is. Joy is complicated, but I will say at the top of the rotunda. So this forces you to ideally walk the entire exhibition. One of the last. One of the last works in the exhibition is a film that I made called Sanguine. And that film consists of myself, my father and my son performing different acts of care and spending time together. And what it really symbolizes partially for me, is this opportunity at this time in my life where I'm both a father to a son and the son to a father. And so that liminal space, that space in the middle where I'm, you know, actively caring for and teaching but continuing to be taught and cared for by my own father, and thinking about how that transition functions, that one day I will probably pivot to being the caretaker for my father, more so, and that my son will pivot to being the caretaker for me. And so that sense of kind of transition, that sense of recognizing a time in one's life is really at the center of where my project is right now. And that film is a great illustrator of it.
- [23:12]
Alison Stewart
That was my conversation with multimedia conceptual artist Rasheed Johnson. His show A Poem for Deep Thinkers is on view at the Guggenheim until January 18th. Up next, the Frick Collection reopened over the spring after five years of being closed to the public. I talked with its curator Amy Eng, about the museum's renovation and the window it provides into the opulent lives of New York's upper crust at the turn of the century. This is all of it.
- [23:54]
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