At the Guggenheim, Rashid Johnson’s “A Poem for Deep Thinkers” turns the museum’s spiral into an emotional landscape: over 90 works unfold across two decades, layering memory, vulnerability, and material into a raw, reflective visual poem.
At first glance, Rashid Johnson’s exhibition A Poem for Deep Thinkers, on view at the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, feels like a reclamation – a return not only to materials
and motifs that have shaped his artistic practice but to something more intimate: a
philosophy of feeling. Installed in Frank Lloyd Wright’s continuous spiral of white concrete,
Johnson’s retrospective breathes unease and tenderness into the museum’s iconic rotunda.
It is a space that often flattens time, drawing the eye upward in a singular, disorienting
gesture. But Johnson interrupts that linearity. He folds time, memory, and emotional
complexity into something both dense and permeable.
RASHID JOHNSON’S “A POEM FOR DEEP THINKERS” AT SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
The retrospective spans over two decades of work and over 90 pieces, from early
conceptual photography to immersive installations and monumental tiled paintings. Yet
rather than presenting a chronological or strictly thematic survey, the exhibition seems to
move like a mind in reflection: circling around memory, returning to wounds, layering gesture
over thought. Johnson’s well-known lexicon – shea butter, black soap, mirrors, books, steel,
and plant life – is fully present, but in this context, it feels less symbolic and more rawly
material. These are not merely cultural signifiers or autobiographical shorthand. They are the
substance of lived experience: fragrant, fragile, unstable, soothing.
HUMAN VULNERABILITY AND VISUAL CONFIDENCE
There is a deep vulnerability at the heart of Johnson’s work that often gets obscured by the
large scale and visual confidence of his pieces. But vulnerability is precisely what this show
amplifies. His Anxious Men series, first introduced nearly a decade ago, is given renewed
gravity here. The roughly drawn faces – wide eyes, trembling lines – are repeated like a
mantra across tiled surfaces, sometimes painted in searing red, sometimes etched into black
soap. What initially appeared to be an almost comic expression of anxiety now reads as both
an interior scream and a collective reckoning. These are not caricatures; they are portraits of
psychic rupture. In a world that often demands stoicism from Black men, Johnson’s
insistence on anxiety becomes a radical act of emotional disclosure.
“SANGUINE”, A ROOM-SIZED INSTALLATION BY RASHID JOHNSON
And then there is Sanguine, the towering, room-sized installation that feels both shelter and shrine. Within its scaffolding are ferns and philodendrons, video screens, and the quiet presence of lived time. It is in Sanguine that the exhibition title finds its most direct echo.
Borrowed from a poem by Amiri Baraka, the phrase “a poem for deep thinkers” is less a title
than an invitation – or perhaps, a demand. This is not a show to be skimmed. It requires stillness. It asks you to sit with discomfort, with beauty, with questions that do not resolve
easily.
In the Guggenheim, where voices often echo and art can feel distant behind glass or
elevation, Johnson builds rooms of closeness. He builds spaces where viewers might
recognize themselves, or better, see someone else’s interiority in ways they hadn’t
considered. In the end, A Poem for Deep Thinkers is exactly what its title suggests: a long,
elliptical meditation not on answers but on attention.
LINK
- https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/rashid-johnson-a-poem-for-deep-thinkers
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