Four months into the run of his career retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, contemporary artist Rashid Johnson appeared on CBS Sunday Morning this week to discuss 30 years of art making.
Johnson sat down with the network’s Alina Cho at his studio and the museum amid his exhibition A Poem for Deep Thinkers, which includes hovering plants in the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed spiraling rotunda in addition to other sculptures, paintings, and video work.
Johnson characterized his Guggenheim show as a sort of family reunion of his artworks throughout the decades, quipping that every family reunion is “fairly complicated.” He led Cho to his large-scale work, “Anxious Audience,” which sold for $879,000 at Christie’s in 2019. Cho asked Johnson about his struggle with anxiety.
“Didn’t you say you were born anxious?” Cho asks the artist. “Oh yeah, it’s been from the go,” he replies. “My anxiety is really… it mirrors my fear. I’m afraid … I can tell you what I’m not afraid of. I’m not afraid to be vulnerable.”
Against camera shots of the artist lapping surfaces in paint and carving them out, he said that subtraction is part of his artistic process.
“The first thing that I learned to love outside of my family was art,” Johnson said. “When you have that experience and you get so much direction from it, you get to fulfill your curiosity. It gives you a lifetime of potential joy.”
