Rashid Johnson
Black soap, shea butter, broken tile and mirrors, scratched into anxious faces.
Rashid Johnson was born in Chicago in 1977 and was included in Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001 while still in his twenties, as a photographer. He moved into sculpture and installation built from a specific set of materials with cultural weight — black soap, shea butter, ceramic tile, red oak flooring, Persian rugs, plants, books — and into the Anxious Men, faces gouged into a black soap and wax surface with the artist's own fingers and a sharp tool. He has worked increasingly at architectural scale, with living plants and sound, and directed a feature film of Native Son.
The Anxious Men and Anxious Audience works lead this market and are also its principal conservation problem: black soap and wax on tile remain soft, are sensitive to heat and to handling, and cannot be surface-cleaned, so condition and environmental history bear directly on value. Shelf and Escape Collages incorporating organic material and living plants raise questions of what is replaceable and what is not, and the artist's instructions form part of the work. Photographs from the early period exist in small editions and are scarce.
If you own a work by Rashid Johnson
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.