Author

Dealing with actors is incredibly complex because they oftentimes are like pieces of clay. They want to be told how you want it done. You have to then decide if you want to be the teller or if you want to give them agency.

From Rashid Johnson

I was going through a divorce, and I had a lot of reading I was doing, and I developed what was probably a serious anxiety problem - because I was about as poor as you can get, in graduate school, and trying to make my work and keep my head above water.

From Rashid Johnson

I started rereading 'The Dutchman' - I kind of just pulled it off the shelf.

From Rashid Johnson

What I really hoped to do with my work was to at least be able to define my relationship to race.

From Rashid Johnson

I wanted my art to deal with very formal concerns and to deal with very material concerns, and to deal with antecedents and art history, which for me go very far beyond just the influence of African-American artists.

From Rashid Johnson

My father ran a CB radio business. I grew up in a cluttered space that was filled with radios and antennas. It felt alien.

From Rashid Johnson

The thing that turned out to be interesting about CB radios was the ability to call out in the world with anonymity. You choose your handle. Race and class become non-signifiers.

From Rashid Johnson

When I was younger, I would see shea butter being sold on the street, and I was interested how people were still coating themselves in the theater of Africanism. You see that in dashikis and hairstyles and music.

From Rashid Johnson

I'd begun to collect things that were lying in piles on the floor of my studio. I had run out of space, and I started to build shelves. I turned around one day and realized that that was the vehicle for carrying so many of the things that I was looking at and talking about, so they went from the walls to the works.

From Rashid Johnson

As an artist, I've always felt most comfortable outside of the art supply store. So domestic materials are the ones that most help inform what I'm trying to talk about and our familiarity as a whole - kind of the collective us, I guess.

From Rashid Johnson

Rashid Johnson

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