Rashid Johnson valuation
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.
What a work by Rashid Johnson is worth
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Bio
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.
Freestyle, Hauser & Wirth and the Guggenheim
Johnson came to notice at twenty-four in Freestyle, Thelma Golden's 2001 exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem. He was a finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize in 2011, began showing with Hauser & Wirth in 2012, directed the film Native Son, released in 2019, and had a retrospective, A Poem for Deep Thinkers, at the Guggenheim in New York in 2025.
For a sculpture or installation, the components list and installation instructions from the gallery are part of the work, and for a painting the series and date identify it.
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