Click Here to open a 360 experience of Untitled Anxious Red in a 360 degree natural environment inspired by Johnson's Earth Day project. Best viewed with a VR headset but works in non VR mode in web browsers as well. Be sure to click the play button before entering VR if using VR headset.
Rashid Johnson
AChicago native who now lives and works in New York, Rashid Johnson works in a range of two-dimensional and three-dimensional mediums including installations and performance art. Johnson even directed the adaptation of the novel Native son for a feature film. Johnson’s works can certainly strike on the themes of race and class but he also “employs materials drawn from specific autobiographical contexts—including those related to African American intellectual and imaginative life—and though his practice had its beginnings in photography and conceptual art, Johnson is equally interested in testing the ability of abstract visual languages to communicate across cultural boundaries.”(davidkordansky)
During the coronavirus pandemic that started March of 2020, Johnson and his family withdrew from the crowded city by moving to the Hamptons of Long Island. Being removed from his city studio was not an excuse for Johnson to relax, he kept busy working out of a studio in the basement of the home. Johnson’s art of this time is emotional and intellectual and communicated these new experiences. The pandemic, and his new natural surroundings would inspire the artist in many ways.
Using a vibrant color he developed, Johnson himself stated that perhaps no color is more urgent than red. Johnson created a series of works under the title Anxious Red, they are derived from an earlier series called Anxious Man. The name and urgency of the color are reactions to the lockdown and the pandemic. The series began as drawings of human faces that are deconstructed from layering on of pigment. “Through these archetypal faces, Johnson has captured the life and death urgency of this moment.” (Hauser & Wirth) The works connect with Abstract Expressionism through his free-flowing expression of emotions to the surface (figuratively and literally). Another aspect of the pandemic escape from the city was the artist’s connection with nature at his new home. Prints made based on the Anxious Red series were sold on Earth Day to raise money ($100, 000 in total) for Art to Acres and 14+ Foundation.
