Top 35 Quotes & Sayings by Rashid Johnson
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American photographer Rashid Johnson.
Last updated on April 21, 2025.
What I really hoped to do with my work was to at least be able to define my relationship to race.
I've always been interested in this idea of a privileged life, probably because it's something I hadn't seen much of.
You can really learn a lot from young people and the way they view the world.
Growing up in Chicago, there was a very particular type of home that would display the black Jesus figure. It wasn't a radical home. You wouldn't find these in a Black Panther house. There's still a strong allegiance to Christianity.
Race, class, childhood experience, the books I found on my mother's bookshelf, the albums I found in my father's basement - these things are all part of who I am and will always be a part of my work.
I started rereading 'The Dutchman' - I kind of just pulled it off the shelf.
I've always had an interest in complicating the way that we perceive the black character, whether it's the black academic or scholar or activist or black intellectual.
My father had a big brick cell phone, before anyone had a cell phone, because he was really just into that kind of thing - communication devices. I grew up between my father's laboratory and my mother's library.
I can bring in all these different components, and I marry these components, and I let them get traversed by the viewer, who reorganizes them.
I've been interested in LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's work for quite a while. My first introduction to LeRoi Jones was when my mother used to read me the 'Dead Lecturer' poems when I was a kid.
The whole ability to look at the complexity of race and any sort of associated -ism and still find humor, that's a very interesting space.
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.
'The New Black Yoga' originally was born from a film that I had made prior called 'Black Yoga.' And I was living in Berlin at the time, dealing with a lot of anxiety and stress around the project that I was working on, which is not an abnormal thing for me.
My composition often goes toward the black middle class or the black super-wealthy or strong historical black figures.
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.
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.
I attempted to do yoga in German, and it was not particularly successful. So at that time, I started thinking about the idea of just movement and how I could move to de-stress.
When I was younger, I remember there was a really famous book, and it was called 'The People Could Fly.' And so this idea of, kind of like, black characters kind of jumping into space and kind of the challenge that they presented to gravity I thought was really interesting.
For me, all the materials and objects I employ come from a specific space that's very personal.
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.
I was born in Evanston, about three blocks away from the Chicago border. My mother, at the time, was finishing her Ph.D. in African History at Northwestern University. Soon after my birth, my parents split, and my father moved to Wicker Park, which is on the north side of the city.
My father ran a CB radio business. I grew up in a cluttered space that was filled with radios and antennas. It felt alien.
I say that I suffer from what Rosalind Krauss was calling the post-medium condition, where an artist essentially employs several mediums in order to bring to life whatever specific ideas that they have. For me it's always been that way.
I have an investment in the signifying aspects of the material as well as an understanding of antecedent bodies of work. That informs the way I make marks and make decisions.
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.
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.
When I was young, I remember feeling a real thirst for opportunities around the arts, for learning about how artists function and how institutions work.
I don't have any other skills. Some artists say that to mean that their embodied passion for art gave them no choice. I say it, very specifically, to say that I really didn't have any other options.
As an undergrad at Columbia College in Chicago, I came across 'Boondocks,' and then I watched the 'Boondocks' television show.
The way that light hits objects, I think, is one of the more important things that sculpture and photography share.
The way that light hits objects in life, three-dimensional objects before you photograph them, is really the story of photography.
My mother introduced me to more academic-minded writers, Cornel West and Skip Gates. In her library, I came across, when I was very young, Harold Cruse's 'The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,' which is like a bible of Negro intellectuals from Frederick Douglass to Amiri Baraka.
My father owned a small company, called Gundel Electronics, where he did community band radio and some repair stuff.
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.
Oh, yeah, I'm all about ritual.
Related Authors
Amanda de Cadenet Quotes
English
Photographer
Annie Leibovitz Quotes
American
Photographer
Ansel Adams Quotes
American
Photographer
David Bailey Quotes
English
Photographer
David LaChapelle Quotes
American
Photographer
Elliott Erwitt Quotes
French
Photographer
Garry Winogrand Quotes
American
Photographer
Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes
French
Photographer
Jay Maisel Quotes
American
Photographer
Lynsey Addario Quotes
American
Photographer
Martin Parr Quotes
British
Photographer
Mary Ellen Mark Quotes
American
Photographer
Nan Goldin Quotes
American
Photographer
Robert Adams Quotes
American
Photographer
Sally Mann Quotes
American
Photographer
Sam Abell Quotes
American
Photographer