This Renowned Artist Brings Plants, Shea Butter and Black Soap Into His Groundbreaking Work

In Rashid Johnson’s largest show of art yet, the power of mixed media is on full display

Jacoba Urist

June 3, 2025

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A constellation of oversize plants suspended in the atrium of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum creates a luscious urban terrarium. Natural light shines from the oculus of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic spiral building. The floating greenhouse is the centerpiece of a major midcareer survey of contemporary master Rashid Johnson, “A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” on view at the Guggenheim through January 2026 before it travels to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in March and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in November.

“Rashid Johnson is an artist who works with multiple media and moves fluidly between photography, sculpture, installation, video and his own brand of painting,” says Naomi Beckwith, the Guggenheim’s deputy director and chief curator, who organized the show. “This exhibition will give you a great sense of what contemporary art feels like right now.” She notes that the artist’s work is a product of Black ’90s hip-hop culture, “a generation that’s fluid in quoting and citing things, and mixing them together in their own poetic way.”

“Johnson’s understanding of the importance of being able to borrow from many different inspirations, whether it be high culture like poetry, or pop culture like music, is really important,” she says.

“A Poem for Deep Thinkers” spans 90 works, loosely chronological, starting with Johnson’s emergence on the art scene with his early, pivotal 1998-1999 portrait series, “Seeing in the Dark,” featuring homeless men living on the Chicago streets. Johnson worked on the series while he was a sophomore at Columbia College Chicago, using the low-cost Van Dyke brown printing method that produces a signature brown color. Johnson’s most recent works are from 2024 and 2025, including the massive, gridded steel installation, Antoine’s Organ, composed of vegetation, books by prominent Black authors. The installation space also features a piano, where musicians perform throughout the exhibition’s run. At the Guggenheim, an expansive display of Johnson’s world unfurls, from collaged ceramic-mirror mosaics and a table crafted of crumbling shea butter to his “Anxious Men,” “Soul” and “God” paintings. Plant life, shea butter, black soap and recurring imagery thread his work over the decades. It is the Chicago-born 48-year-old’s largest show to date, and the first opportunity to experience the full breadth of his mixed-media way of making art.

“I use painting. I use filmmaking. I use sculpture. But to some degree, my medium is freedom and flexibility,” says Johnson.

Conceptual and aesthetic themes also pervade his framework. For example, Johnson has embraced what art historians call gestural abstraction, a spontaneous style of smearing, pouring or dribbling paint on canvas, pioneered by artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, who also incorporated figures into his expressive technique. “I’m thinking about the relationship that gesture has to meditation,” Johnson says. “In later works, I start to put names to these actions that have relationships very specifically with the condition of the spiritual. So, I start to say words like ‘God’ and ‘Soul.’”

The “God” paintings are less about religion and more about the complexity of the idea of a higher power. Born from a deeply personal transition in the artist’s life, the intense red pattern of the almond-like vesica piscis shape—a mathematical symbol derived from the intersection of two circles—in the work explores the forces of mantra, consistency and repetition. “I was going through a set of changes, thinking about my relationship to my son, being around my father and thinking about spirituality,” Johnson says of the moment that led him to connect the color red to visualizing a higher power, a concept manifested in Alcoholics Anonymous during his sobriety journey. “I happened to be on a beach trip with my family, laying on the beach with my eyes closed and I felt the warmth of the sun on my face,” he adds. “Through my closed eyes, I could witness the red that is born of the sun beating against the back of your eyelids, which became darker and richer.”

Indeed, for Johnson, painting is a tool to capture complex emotions that force us to confront our sense of vulnerability. His “Anxious Men” paintings, he says, are a set of gestures that conjure a single face, made of ceramic tile, black soap and wax or, when repeated, an audience of faces.

“Anxiety has been not only part of my life, but oftentimes part of our collective consciousness,” he says. “But when I illustrate it and I give you concrete space to witness it, what does it feel like to suspend disbelief long enough to recognize that these paintings can be the visual illustration of a very complicated referential position?”

The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden holds one of Johnson’s red “Anxious Men” paintings, dated August 18, 2020, in its permanent collection. The Hirshhorn’s head curator, Evelyn Hankins, says it speaks to the anxiety of that specific moment during the Covid-19 pandemic. Conceptual art and abstract minimalism can at times can be difficult art forms to engage with, she acknowledges. But Johnson’s steel-framework installations of shea butter, books and live plants both are deeply personal and reference broader cultural realms. “I think about these pieces as something we can all share and identify with,” Hankins says. “He’s filling the sculpture with things that are alive and books that have meaning to him.”

Other materials that hold meaning, shea butter and black soap—which both come from West Africa and are popular in Black households—signify self-care and maintenance, Beckwith explains, not “just vanity, but really taking care of one’s inner and outer bodily life.”

She describes Johnson’s physical process of “mushing and squishing” shea butter in his Shea Butter Table and melting black soap down with wax for his paintings. Instead of using a paintbrush, she says, he pours the substance “over a surface, moving the work around and letting it settle so you can see the runs and the drip as it’s moving from solid to liquid.”

“There’s a common misconception that almost anything can be art. Grab trash off the street and make a treasure,” says Beckwith. “And the truth of the matter is, a very good artist could. But what’s great about Rashid’s work is that very specific materials and things are important to him, and they only become poetry because of that relationship to his life.”

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Jacoba Urist is an art and culture journalist in New York City.