The New Yorker:

The artist’s sprawling survey at the Guggenheim reveals an intellect unfolding and a life under way.

By Vinson Cunningham

The versatile, restless, maddeningly guileful artist Rashid Johnson—whose career-spanning survey exhibition, “A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” is now up at the Guggenheim, inhabiting almost the entire museum—is forty-seven. Normally, the age of the artist matters only as a kind of career timekeeping: it’s a quick, imprecise way to figure out whether you’re dealing with some upstart art star or an eminence taking one last valedictory turn, or a patient sufferer in that long purgatory of “mid-career.” But Johnson’sshow, which unfolds chronologically, feels like one winding, thorny, searching, implicitly memoiristic half-century-long process of thought—a record of growing up.

No one aesthetic or approach to art-making can fully describe the ninety or so works that make up “A Poem for Deep Thinkers.” There are big, energizing houseplants hanging from the ceiling by barely visible strings. There are rugs on platforms and tables, making a soft surface for mysterious such experiments as shea butter carved and crumbled into pieces or, in one case, a dated video monitor showing Johnson practicing his own remixed version of yoga. There are satirical photographs and movingly earnest video. There are awkwardly hewn, possibly functional everyday items like fire pits and plant pots that Johnson calls “busts.” There are paintings—some on canvas and others on gleaming white tile.

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