Rashid Johnson is coming home. Starting Nov. 7, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago will open “A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” a 70-work survey of the artist's career that marks his third solo exhibition at the museum, following earlier shows there in 2002 and 2012. The exhibition runs through April 25, 2027, giving Chicagoans more than five months to take in a body of work built from photography, painting, sculpture, architecture, and materials pulled straight out of a household cabinet.
According to mcachicago.org, Johnson was born in Chicago in 1977 and now lives in New York City. The MCA presentation is curated by Jack Schneider, Assistant Curator, with Korina Hernandez, Curatorial Assistant, and it pulls together photographs of The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club, black-soap-and-wax Cosmic Slops wall reliefs, and works from his Anxious Men and Broken Men series. Per the Chicago Tribune, the show surveys nearly 30 years of Johnson's work and functions as a mid-career retrospective.
A Childhood Split Between Evanston and Wicker Park
Johnson's Chicago roots run through this exhibition. The Tribune reports that he grew up between Evanston and Wicker Park; WPR describes his mother as a professor of African history and his father as someone who worked with electronics and materials. He was raised in Evanston and attended Evanston Township High School, according to the same account carried by Chicago Gallery News.
The Tribune also reports that Johnson studied photography at Columbia College Chicago and later pursued an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He now lives in New York City, according to the MCA.
Fluid Across Mediums, Grounded in Domestic Materials
Chicago Gallery News asked Johnson: “You move fluidly between photography, painting, sculpture, and large-scale architecture.” The Tribune reports his art draws on film, paint, canvas, shea butter, black soap and potted plants, while WPR notes that his work incorporates domestic materials tied to memories of his Afrocentric childhood and engagement with African-American history and culture.
In the interview, Johnson discusses the vocabulary of materials like black soap, shea butter, books and plants and how viewers interpret them. A recurring thread, per WPR, is the tension between individual and collective identity — a theme that runs through decades of his output.
A Piano Hidden Inside the Foliage
One of Johnson's most talked-about works, Antoine's Organ, embeds a piano within a sprawling structure filled with tropical plants, ceramic pots and books. “A piano suspended in the middle of the structure,” is how WPR describes it, and the station reports that a musician may be inside the structure playing it. Johnson has described the piece in deeply personal terms, telling WPR, “I've talked about it as being my brain.”
The Tribune also reports on Sanguine, a recent short film featuring Johnson with his father and son spending time together and caring for one another — a quieter, more intimate counterpoint to the scale of works like Antoine's Organ.
Redesigned Galleries, a Chronological Arc
Because the MCA's contemporary galleries differ from the museum's other spaces, Johnson said the setup required him to rethink how smaller works could be gathered into something larger. “They make you gather them, build structures and narratives,” he told Chicago Gallery News, describing both the challenge and the opportunity that comes with it.
The New Yorker, which reviewed the exhibition's earlier run, described it as a show that “unfolds chronologically” and “feels like one winding, thorny, searching, implicitly memoiristic half-century-long process of thought — a record of growing up.” The Tribune describes the exhibition as a mid-career retrospective spanning nearly 30 years of Johnson's work.
From the Guggenheim to Chicago, and On to Berkeley
“A Poem for Deep Thinkers” didn't start in Chicago. Chicago Gallery News reports the exhibition previously stopped at New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth before arriving at the MCA. The New Yorker, writing about the Guggenheim run, called it a “career-spanning survey exhibition.” The Tribune reports the show began at the Guggenheim in New York City in 2025 and will travel to Berkeley, California, once its Chicago run wraps.
Johnson isn't a stranger to major museum stages beyond New York and Chicago, either. The MCA notes he's held solo exhibitions at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City and the Aspen Art Museum, both in 2019 — part of a résumé that now circles back, fittingly, to the city where his career in art first took shape.
