Rashid Johnson: The Rise and Fall of a Proper Negro

Rashid Johnson’s photographs and sculptures examine the often less-examined aspects of the black middle-class. He states “I am a Negro artist demagogue producing work that allows me to embrace and reject any cultural signifiers that I choose to confront.  Using what David Hammons once called ‘cultural abstraction’ as a vehicle, I make photographs, videos and sculptures that not only work as devices for self-indulgent muckraking but also provoke bouts of hopeless nostalgia.  The ideas addressed; hair and assorted products, language, violence, and social uprising, all work as tools in my devious plan to spelunk the bottomless agenda of cultural identity politics.  The work neither accepts nor rejects its own accusation of socio-cultural assimilation, but merely comments on the complexity of what W.E.B. Dubois once framed as one’s ‘double consciousness.’”