It is an inadequate use of language to call Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers an installation, an exhibition, a survey. Because it feels like more. A defining moment of our times? A definition of art in the 21st century. A shape-shifting moment? I have been struggling this weekend thinking of what to say in regards to a show that, for one, I was highly anticipating and, two, I think the art world sorely needed. Johnson's art for me has been about the idealization of growth, and there is enough around Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim design where Johnson's work touches on organic and non-organic biology. But it is the way he does this, the fact that history, philosophy, literature, and music, as the museum points out and how the team lays this show out, that is so outstanding. You feel like art is growing and pulsating, that language is expanding within Johnson's practice. 

It makes sense that there will be an emphasis on live performances throughout the run of the show, as it fits into this idea of art as a living, breathing thing. Something to be experienced and to live around you. From the museum: "This major solo exhibition highlights Johnson’s role as a scholar of art history, a mediator of Black popular culture, and as a creative force in contemporary art. Almost 90 works—from black-soap paintings and spray-painted text works to large-scale sculptures, film, and video—will fill the museum’s rotunda, including Sanguine, a monumental site-specific work on the building’s top ramp with an embedded piano for musical performances. Additionally, a dynamic program of events, developed in collaboration with community partners across New York City, will activate a sculptural stage on the rotunda floor."

When I think of Johnson, I think of the graffiti-like paintings that touch on his youth and of course the plant and foliage installation with Jazz music that never seems to age. He is just a voice of the time, a time of where we have seen tremendous progress within a time of intense eruption of racial and gender biases. There is a crumbling of an infrastructure that, although in need of a renovation, seems to be left to the hands of an unauthorized and unqualified architects. Somewhere in this, Johnson is making, there is Jazz being played, there is beauty growing. That is A Poem for Deep Thinkers. —Evan Pricco