Quotes from Rashid Johnson

You can really learn a lot from young people and the way they view the world.

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.

My composition often goes toward the black middle class or the black super-wealthy or strong historical black figures.

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.

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.

For me, all the materials and objects I employ come from a specific space that's very personal.

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.

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.

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.