On a walk-through of his new exhibition, artist Rashid Johnson paused in front of a deep, earthy red painting called “Anxious Men.” Its surface is dense with looping, almost frantic gestures. Then he stepped aside and gestured toward a low platform built in front of the piece.
“People can come up,” he said, imagining visitors standing there, lifting their voices, becoming part of the work itself.
At the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, that invitation, to stand inside the art, to feel seen by it, runs through "A Poem for Deep Thinkers," Johnson’s mid-career survey. The exhibition spans roughly three decades, bringing together paintings, sculpture, film and installation into what he describes less as a single argument and more as a record of how he thinks.
Johnson, born in Chicago in 1977 and now based in New York, emerged in the early 2000s as part of a generation of artists exploring identity in ways that resist easy definition. Johnson developed an early connection to African diasporic history and culture that continues to shape his work.
Inside the artist's mind
Over the past two decades, he has become an influential contemporary artist known for working across painting, sculpture, film and installation. Series like his Anxious Men paintings have helped define his practice, blending philosophical questions with deeply personal reflections on vulnerability.
“There's no singular thematic kind of concern or idea being unpacked," Johnson said. “It is just the vision and the ideas that have existed inside my thinking that you get to witness more than anything else...It’s a point of reflection and pause.”
The show’s title nods to the late poet Amiri Baraka, whose writing challenged assumptions about who gets to be considered a “deep thinker.” Johnson borrows that provocation, using it as both a reference point and an open-ended metaphor.
Across the galleries, that openness takes physical form. In one room, a steel 28-foot cage houses books, ceramics, plants, black soap, traditionally used for sensitive skin in West Africa and a working piano becomes both medium and a metaphor. The installation is called "Antoine’s Organ." When Antoine, a Black pianist based in Brooklyn, sits down to play, the sculpture shifts, becoming performance, sound and life all at once.
Elsewhere, materials carry their own histories. Shea butter sits carved atop a branded wood table. Its softness points to vulnerability. Hanging on the wall is "Fatherhood, as described by Paul Beatty," a large carved wood shelf holding books by writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Randall Kennedy, embedding language and theory directly into the work.
A kaleidoscope of materials
Johnson’s practice is deliberately expansive. He works with steel, wax, wood, ceramics, photography and film — often layering them together into what he calls a “kaleidoscopic investigation of material.” But beneath that range is a consistent interest in participation with stages, platforms and spaces that ask viewers not just to look, but to engage.
That impulse connects back to the “Anxious Men” paintings that anchor parts of the exhibition. They reflect what Johnson calls “collective anxiety”— a feeling he knows personally.
“I’ve always struggled with anxiety,” he said. “But it’s also allowed me to think about vulnerability… how you grow from obstacles.”
For Johnson, vulnerability isn’t something to avoid; it’s something to work through, even to embrace. He often places himself directly inside his work, appearing in films and photographs, not just out of convenience but because, as he puts it, he has “the most access” to himself.
“I don't think of vulnerability as a pejorative, I don't inherently find that to be a negative idea,” he said. “I do feel vulnerable and I feel rewarded by that.”
That sense of personal inquiry extends to how he approaches identity. While his work frequently engages Black cultural life and history, Johnson resists flattening those ideas into a single narrative.
"I challenge a lot of these phrases, the idea of the black experience or black culture,” he said. “I think that these are moving targets and evolving themes.”
Instead, he frames his perspective as one shaped by his own upbringing. Raised by an academic mother and a father who served in the Vietnam war, Johnson moved between different social and economic worlds. What emerges in the work is less a fixed definition than a set of questions about history, belonging, and empathy.
“The thing that I think is most shared by us is a sense of empathy,” he said, “a sense of love… and thinking about other people’s survival in a complicated world and a world that has often times presented significant challenges to people who look like them.”
That ethos carries through the exhibition’s design. Whether it’s a stage inviting visitors to step up, or a living plant that requires care, the works ask for attention and, in some cases, responsibility.
For the Modern in Fort Worth, curator Andrea Karnes says the show speaks to the human experience. It invites diverse audiences to engage with Johnson's multidisciplinary practice that is both intellectual and widely accessible.
“Johnson brings a vital and timely perspective that aligns closely with The Modern's mission to showcase art of critical importance and broad public resonance,” she said.
In "A Poem for Deep Thinkers," that sense of exchange between artist and audience, object and participant become the throughline. The result is a show that doesn’t just present a body of work, but opens a space to stand inside it, and think a little deeper.
DETAILS: "A Poem for Deep Thinkers" runs through September 27 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
