Andrea Karnes

From his early self-portraits to his site-specific installations, this volume underscores Rashid Johnson's fearless engagement with the central themes, questions and aesthetics of the contemporary era Co-organized by the Guggenheim New York and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, A Poem for Deep Thinkers is a three-decade survey of Rashid Johnson’s artistic career. It situates the artist within three interconnected spheres: as a scholar of art history; as a mediator of Black popular culture and its widespread commodification; and as an artist engaged with the globalization of contemporary art. The exhibition and accompanying catalog feature nearly 90 artworks, including early photographs, Cosmic Slops, spray-painted text works, collage paintings, Broken Men mosaics, film projects, and key sculptures and installations that incorporate materials such as shea butter, black soap, plants, ceramic vessels and wax. These explorations demonstrate Johnson’s uncommon fluency with multiple materials and forms as well as a nuanced ability to synthesize the condition of the human psyche. Lavishly produced with gold block edges and illustrated with more than 200 images, the publication offers creative meditations on excerpts by literary icons Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jean Genet, Paul Beatty and Amiri Baraka, interspersed among insightful essays and an interview that further illuminate Johnson’s work. Born and raised in Chicago, Rashid Johnson (born 1977) received fine arts degrees from Columbia College Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. At the age of 24, his work was included in Thelma Golden’s 2001 exhibition Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Johnson made his directorial debut with his 2019 adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son.

Drawing on pop-culture archetypes and commercial materials, Da Corte’s foam, shampoo and glass paintings receive their first dedicated museum survey and publication Merging modernist color theory and Postminimalist spatial experiments with the crowded, beautiful trash-scape of contemporary culture, Alex Da Corte (born 1980) addresses sexuality, invisible labor, taste, power and desire. While most previous showcases have focused on Da Corte’s installations, The Whale is the first exhibition to survey his rich and eccentric relationship with painting over the past decade. As is to be expected with his irreverent approach, Da Corte paints with both traditional and unconventional materials. His Shampoo Paintings are created with drugstore hair products, while his Puffy Paintings consist of upholstered neoprene. Other works include his reverse paintings on glass, most commonly used in celluloid animation and commercial sign-making. Many of these paintings are published in book form for the first time, accompanied by Da Corte’s "Voice Memos" that elucidate his creative process. This book was published in conjunction with Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Upon first glance, Cordelia Bailey's street photography of people and creatures, places and things, and acts of Nature falls within documentary traditions of image making and portraiture. Yet upon closer inspection, one recognizes a high degree of Bailey's artistic intervention in postproduction, thus making the majority of her final images realistically staged fiction, with the intention of creating fleeting scenes suggestive of plausible encounters in everyday life.""Cordelia Bailey's strength within this body of work is in depicting psychosocial aspects in each photographic scene. She develops her own visual poetry, providing fixed points of reference for us to consider perceptions rather than realities - both hers and our own."" - Madeline Yale Preston, excerpted from ""People and Creatures: Reinventing Theater from the Real