Rashid Johnson: “Unlike most careers, there's no retirement”

I speak with Rashid Johnson as an Uber takes him through Manhattan. Earlier this summer, he opened a solo exhibition at Château La Coste, where a new body of work is set among cypresses and olive trees. The 200-hectare wine estate and sculpture park lies in Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, about 15 kilometres north of Aix-en-Provence. Permanent works by Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin and Hiroshi Sugimoto are scattered across the grounds.

In the estate’s Oscar Niemeyer Auditorium, Johnson’s film Sanguine (2024) moves between three generations of his family: his father, himself and his son.

Johnson’s exhibition was one of three presented at the estate this summer, alongside a show by the Iranian-born American artist Sheree Hovsepian and a group exhibition they co-curated with artists from their circle. Hovsepian, from whom Johnson separated in May after 15 years of marriage, described the group show as a portrait of connection. Johnson, when asked about collaboration, reaches for a less comfortable word: dependence.

Film makes him anxious, he says, because it takes the work out of his hands. Directing a crew is like commanding a Latvian army without speaking Latvian. He values the family films – now four – for what they ask of the people in them. His father does what he is asked. Many fathers, Johnson notes, would not.

Johnson turns fifty next year. The final leg of A Poem for Deep Thinkers, his largest exhibition to date, opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago on 7 November, forty-five minutes from where he grew up. We spoke about why collaboration makes him nervous, how a Buddhist friend taught him when a painting is finished, and what he would say to the twenty-four-year-old selected for Freestyle, the Studio Museum in Harlem exhibition associated with the term post-black.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Rashid Johnson Oscar Niemeyer Auditorium5 July 2026 – 17 January 2027 Photo by Stephane Aboudaram.

TS: I see a lot of exhibitions that talk about works being in dialogue with each other across mediums. With this show, I got a really strong sense of how much the works actually were actually speaking to each other, despite being very different. I wanted to get a sense of how that dialogue developed, and whether you had an idea of how much each different body of work would interrelate.

RJ: I have a deep investment in medium flexibility. Oftentimes I'll be working through a body of work and there will be something happening in parallel in sculpture, something happening in parallel in film, in painting. So it all happens in conjunction and serves different opportunities in my practice. For an audience, they see it as these different medium interventions, these different bodies of work. For me, I see it all as serving the same philosophical investment.

TS: Do you feel more confident working in one particular medium as opposed to another?

RJ: That’s the first time anyone has asked me that specific question, which is interesting to navigate. The simple answer is that I don't feel more confident in one medium over the next. I do get different things from different mediums at times. Painting for me has become a medium that I feel a lot of meditative energy around, and I like the time that it takes. I like the process of it, I like the intentionality of it and I like the autonomy of it. In that scenario it's rewarding as a labour practice.

Film, of course, is so much more collaborative. In some ways film gives me more anxiety, because even the act of sending the film away creates this distance. There's a kind of anxiety that comes from having to wait for it. I've always had that, but I enjoy it too. It's a space where you have to get comfortable being uncomfortable. You're dependent on other people.

And sculpture is a space between the two. It has some of the mark-making, meditative qualities that painting has, where I get to manipulate material. But then, because I send things to a foundry and have to wait for the final results to come, it has some of the same components as film. So between the three of them, different rewards, different anxieties, different opportunities are born.

TS: A friend of mine works in film, and he says you're basically a major general, directing an army.

RJ: Oh yeah, that's what it is. But the thing is, it's almost like you're directing the Latvian army and you don't speak Latvian. Because you don't know what the key grip is doing. You don't really know what his job is. He's going to tell you what he's doing, but you can't do it yourself.

Sheree Hovsepian. Photo by Rick Wenner.

TS: On that point of collaboration, you're working with your family members on the film. I can't imagine collaborating on an art project with some of my family members — I don't think it would go very well. I'm interested to know how that experience was for you, whether anything came out of it that you weren't anticipating, and how it's impacted the way you relate to each other.

RJ: They’ve become these incredible journals for me. They are opportunities to have a certain kind of intimacy that's forced but in the end becomes very genuine. I loved the experience of working with my father and son and what they sacrificed for me. They sacrificed their autonomy. They do what I ask them to do. So they work in service to the film, and trust me to create something they would be comfortable being a part of. The film you saw in France, Sanguine — it is a great device for talking about my life and my relationships.

I've experienced, in conversations with others, that they feel like my family is a stand-in for their family in these scenarios, which is great. It's a weird reference point, but in the 1980s I used to watch sitcoms, and you'd watch something like The Cosby Show — and felt that was a vehicle for you to understand your relationship to your family. Those kinds of things are really fun to play with.

TS: I'm interested to know whether working on these projects with your family has enabled you to understand the interpersonal dynamics between you and your father better. Has it given you more distance?

RJ: I think it's a really appropriate question. Lots of people get that experience of working with their family in life — some people work in family businesses, work for their fathers, work in the business their mother made. There are all of these different dynamics. I didn't necessarily have that experience, so in a way this produces that opportunity for me. There is a real intimacy to doing any kind of labour with your family — but my labour as an artist is how I survive. So there is an enthusiasm for the thing to be good, whatever that means. And they're all willing to sacrifice themselves for that. They want it to be good for me too.

I feel like I do know my father more, and I know what he is willing to do. There are a lot of fathers who wouldn't be willing to do the things that I asked my father to do in this film. So it's seeing their willingness to experience discomfort, seeing their willingness to sacrifice for me and my project and my art — my son doing that stuff for me. It's telling of how they trust me and how I trust them. In the big picture, it's definitely had an impact on the quality of our relationships and how we understand one another.

TS: I became a father to a son just under two years ago. They say that becoming a father is the biggest change any man can experience. I'd be interested to know how that's impacted your work, your approach to it, the way that you think of yourself as an artist.

RJ: It’s been incredibly true for me. My mother's a historian, so I was deeply invested in this idea of my legacy. So a lot of what I did and how I used my time was impacted by this concept.

After having a son I started feeling very differently about it. I became less concerned with how my artwork was going to be the defining narrator of my future, and I realised that the family you love, and the impact you have on them, becomes the narrator of your future. What that really allowed me to do is free my work up. Now, I can just do it. I don't have to think, what is this going to say about me in 30 years? And yes, of course, that's still a lingering thought, but it's not the primary thought around how I work at this point. The primary thought is: make what you need to make, say what you need to say, tell the story you need to tell at any given moment. And that's not your legacy. Your legacy is the people that you leave once you're gone.

Sheree Hovsepian Renzo Piano Pavilion 5 July – 6 September 2026. Photo by Stephane Aboudaram.

TS: My wife used to work for Damien Hirst, and I heard him speak about knowing when a painting was finally completed. He would leave a painting in his studio for two or three months and stare at it for a while, and then at some point come to the conclusion that it was finished and he could send it away. I'm interested to know how you know when a painting is completed, because I imagine there's a compulsion to keep on working on it.

RJ: I have a friend who shared an insight with me. He's a Buddhist, and he meditates. I asked him, "Well, how long do you meditate?" — because I'm trying to figure out what to do, should I start with five minutes, should I start with ten — and he said, "I meditate till I'm done."

It's like eating food. You put food on your plate, but you eat until you're done. You know when you're done eating. And when you make art, and it's what you do, and it's what you're invested in – it's like eating. You know when you're full. So there's not a finish line. You just know.

Now, that can be challenging sometimes, because we've all overeaten, but that's what it feels like to make a painting. You do it until you're full, and then you determine: I think I'm done.

TS: I've never heard that analogy before. This is a question I now ask everyone I speak to. If you could invite five artists, alive or dead, for a dinner party, and you had to cook and serve them some food — who would you invite and what would you serve them?

RJ: First I would invite my friend Hank Willis Thomas, because I would need somebody to unpack the other conversations that would happen with Joan Miró, with the painter Bob Thompson, and with my friend who passed a few years ago, Lawrence Weiner. And I would include Louise Bourgeois. 

I think it would be something simple. I think chilli would be great, because then you could just ladle it out. It'd be super hearty and warm, and that kind of comfort would allow us to foster conversation.

TS: I'm watching my son get into drawing right now, and he's obsessed with it. I'm interested to know whether you can recall a time when you became interested in art as a child, or whether it felt like it was always there, pre-memory.

RJ: I always knew I loved it. But when you're young the people who are most praised are the ones who are best at drawing, painting: drafting and rendering. Those are the ones we consider gifted. And my gifts were thinking philosophically around an artwork, thinking about touch, thinking about how you connect different materials, thinking about symbols and narratives. Those weren't exactly tools that people said, "Oh, you're really good at this."

So I remember making art and just continuing. You know you're an artist when everyone tells you they're not sure this is for you, and you realise it is. You're not just there because everyone said you should do this. Even today, when I get criticism, that feels familiar to me.

TS: What do you think you'd say to the young Rashid? The one straight out of art school, getting involved in the show at the Studio Museum in Harlem with Thelma Golden. 

RJ: I'd tell him to enjoy the journey. I'd tell him that there is no finish line, and unlike most careers, there's no retirement. So all you get is the journey, and everything else is punctuation — whether big exhibitions or big acquisitions. That's not the language. That's the punctuation. So enjoy the sentence, and try to make it a run-on sentence when you can.