Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers brings the Chicago-born artist back to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago with a survey that reads less like a retrospective than a map of recurring pressures in his work. On view from November 7, 2026, through April 25, 2027, the exhibition gathers 70 works that track more than two decades of Johnson’s shifting language, from photography and sculpture to relief, drawing and installation.
Johnson’s practice has long used Black cultural history, philosophy and art history as points of departure, but the work resists illustration. The early photographs from The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club recall a world of posed self-fashioning and social aspiration, while the black-soap-and-wax wall reliefs known as Cosmic Slops push material into rough, elemental forms. More recent works from the Anxious Men and Broken Men series register a different register altogether, one shaped by instability, isolation and the strains of contemporary American life.
That range gives the exhibition its tension. Johnson has built a visual vocabulary that returns again and again to the fragile boundary between self-possession and collapse, collective memory and private unease. His figures, symbols and surfaces often feel compressed under the weight of history, yet they also carry an insistence on style, wit and invention. The work speaks to the present without flattening it into commentary.
This is Johnson’s third solo exhibition at the MCA, following an early-career presentation in 2002 and the mid-career survey A Message to Our Folks in 2012. The museum’s renewed attention to his work reflects both local ties and broader institutional recognition: Johnson has become one of the most visible artists of his generation, with major exhibitions across North America and Europe and work held in leading collections.
Curated by Jack Schneider and Korina Hernandez, the show places Johnson’s concerns in sharp focus. At its core, the exhibition treats thought not as abstraction, but as a lived condition, uneasy, inventive and constantly in motion.
Image: Rashid Johnson, Self-Portrait with my hair parted like Frederick Douglass, 2003. Lambda print mounted on Sintra; 57 1/4 × 45 1/4 × 1 3/8 in. (145.4 × 114.9 × 3.5 cm). Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Gift of the Susan and Lewis Manilow Collection of Chicago Artists, 2006.26. © 2003 Rashid Johnson. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.
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