ART-PRESENTATION: Rashid Johnson-The Hikers

Rashid Johnson is renowned for challenging the assumptions often present in collective notions of blackness. Johnson is among an influential, core group of American artists whose work employs a wide range of materials and images to explore themes of art history, literature, philosophy, and personal and cultural identity. After beginning his career working primarily in photography, Johnson has expanded into a variety of media, including text work, sculptural objects, installation painting, drawing, collage, and performance and choreography.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Aspen Art Museum Archive

Drawing on a dizzying array of historical, cultural, literary, and musical references, Rashid Johnson  ultimately invites audiences to find connections to their own lives. Johnson was the ArtCrush 2018 Aspen Award for Art honoree, and his solo exhibition “The Hikers” at Aspen Art Museum features new and existing works. New works include a major commissioned installation with live performative elements and the artist’s first choreography collaboration complete with aspects of ballet and modern movement. The film “The Hikers” captures two black men who encounter each other while one is ascending and the other descending a mountain’s peak. Their choreographed platonic love story (a version of which the men, both with the Martha Graham Dance Company, perform at the museum) can be viewed as a metaphor about the black experience of alienation in the US. “People of color recognize the existence of one another” Johnson says. “Oftentimes, when people see each other in such circumstances, there’s this kind of joy, almost love”. But, he adds, yearning to connect is also central to the human condition as a whole. Although he has made several films revolving around black figures in motion, “The Hikers” is the most narrative, which he acknowledges may be a result of just having directed his first feature, Native Son, an adaptation of the Richard Wright novel. Also in the show are several new “Escape Collages” an ongoing series of paintings made with ceramic tile, mirror, black soap, oil stick and other materials. Drawing from both his childhood envy of classmates’ far-flung vacations and his father’s surprisingly idyllic photographs of Vietnam taken during the war, Johnson says the collages consider “that dichotomy of the beauty of a landscape mixed with the toxic purpose of your relationship to that place—the dystopic and the optimistic confronting one another”.

Info: Aspen Art Museum, 637 East Hyman Avenue, Aspen, Duration: 4/7-3/11/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.aspenartmuseum.org