Hail We Now Sing Joy Rashid Johnson at the milwaukee art museum

Rashid Johnson's exhibit signals a revival of contemporary work at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Artist Rashid Johnson recently led a tour of his exhibit "Hail We Now Sing Joy" at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Watch the video below for a preview.

“Antoine’s Organ,” the new sculpture in the Milwaukee Art Museum’s featured exhibit space, is so big that it takes a lot of backtracking just to fit it all in a camera frame. It encompasses nearly the entire room and the walls of your mind.

On the eve of the exhibit’s opening, artist Rashid Johnson, a Chicago native who now calls New York home, stands in front of his work and reflects on its meaning and how the African dispora inspired the project.

“In some ways, I’ve talked about it as being my brain,” Johnson said.

The massive sculptural installation of black lattice holds hundreds of live plants, stacks of books by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Debra Dickerson among other contemporary authors weighing in on blackness, mounds of shea butter, TVs looping black yoga and grow lights interspersed like fluorescent slivers.

But Johnson isn’t afraid to freewheel his rumination, new and deeper meanings come easy as he draws on his Afrocentric upbringing, personal bouts with anxiety, the state of minimalism, the don’t-touch-the-art rules of museums, and the kinds of dichotomies that led Louis Armstrong to sing in one song that “I'm white inside, but that don't help my case, cause I can't hide what is on my face” and espouse “What a Wonderful World” it is in another.

How could both sentiments live inside the same artist, Johnson asked aloud.

“These are the kind of dichotomies and contradictions that I think I’m constantly in some process of engaging because I want to have an autonomous voice, but my autonomy is consistently kind of in jeopardy to some degree to the collective, as are all of ours,” Johnson said.

(Photo: Rashid Johnson / Hauser & Wirth)

If you look closely between the plants, you can see “Antoine’s Organ” literally, a black, stand-up piano hidden inside the sculpture. The piece itself is named after Antoine Baldwin, a classically trained pianist and music producer who impressed Johnson so much that the artist knew he needed to incorporate the musician into his work.

Throughout the run of the exhibit, Baldwin and a series of local musicians will play the piano during gallery hours. It’s hard to think of a more triumphant scene for a pianist, the music emitting in a way that’s never been experienced. And yet, as the music fills the space, the player’s identity is obscured in the structure behind the green foliage — another dichotomy that Johnson is so interested in.

“This sculpture kind of turns on when the musician goes inside of it,” Johnson said.

Milwaukee Art Museum Director Dr. Marcelle Polednik said Johnson’s exhibit is a continuation of the institution’s commitment to today’s artists and the installation inside the Calatrava building enhances the work’s narratives.

“This is really the beginning of a revival of our contemporary tradition as an institution. It’s the first time in the history of the Milwaukee Art Museum, in the history of the Calatrava building, that we’ve held a solo exhibition for a living artist,” Polednik said.

The exhibition features 14 large-scale works in all and takes up the museum’s entire feature exhibition space. Using his signature materials of white ceramic tile, red oak flooring, shea butter, black soap, and wax, Johnson examines themes of race, history, yearning, anxiety and escape and investigates the relationship between art, society and personal identity.

Three series comprise the rest of the exhibition, including “Anxious Audience,” large-scale panels of white ceramic tile covered — except for a few curiously empty spaces — with dozens of agitated faces scrawled in black soap and wax.

“I was trying to be coy but they were self portraits when i made them,” Johnson said.

In the new “Falling Men” series, inverted figures fall through the air. They recall the pixelated animations from video games that Johnson played as a youth and can be interpreted as flying heroes or as chalk outlines from crime scenes.

“So you kind of get into the existential possibilities of what these characters are doing and who they are and what their role is,” Johnson said.

Lastly, the “Escape Collage” paintings consist of large-scale vinyl images of lush tropical environments atop a modernist tile surface, featuring scenes and materials from both the natural and built environments. The collages were a meditation on how to use color in a more intentional way, the artist said.

For Johnson, when he was a child in Chicago, the image of a palm tree invited daydreams about success and manhood.

“As a kid I remember thinking that if you could actually live in a place with palm trees, if you could get away from the city and the cold, that meant you’d definitely made it,” he said.

“Hail We Now Sing Joy” runs until Sept. 17 and the museum has created a slate of events throughout it’s run, including panel discussions, live storytelling sessions and a variety of activities for children. Additionally, live music performances are scheduled on Thursdays from 5 to 6 p.m., and on Fridays and Saturdays from 12:15 to 1:15 p.m. Milwaukee-based musician Klassik performs Friday, June 30.

Created By
Scottie Lee Meyers
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