Rashid Johnson, this year’s TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art 2022 honoree and renowned multidisciplinary artist, gifted the DMA with his multimedia work, The New Black Yoga Installation. Featuring five men performing an enigmatic dance of ballet, yoga, tai chi and martial arts across a sun-soaked beach, the work explores the complexity of personal and cultural identity. Johnson’s ongoing meditations on black masculinity and mysticism are reflected through their choreographed dance movements. Rugs branded with crosshairs, a symbol that is etched into the sand in the video, are situated throughout the gallery, projecting the film’s combined sense of peace and foreboding into physical space.
Below is an excerpt from a transcript of a conversation between Rashid Johnson and the DMA’s Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Dr. Anna Katherine Brodbeck, at The Warehouse in Dallas, Texas. This dialogue has been edited for length and clarity.
Katherine:
When I saw you yesterday at the Museum, you were saying it’s been probably eight or nine years since you’ve really interacted with the piece and seen it in person. I’m so happy to have this work on view and to discuss it with you for the first time because it’s a very layered and enigmatic work. Perhaps you could speak a little bit on how this work came about in your practice.
Rashid:
This film, The New Black Yoga, was born of a time when I was living with my wife, Sheree, in Berlin. And it was the first time I was living internationally. I was working on an exhibition and doing a residency. But, as anyone who’s familiar with my work knows about me, I’m an anxious person. And I was asking myself, how do I start to deal with this anxiety? My doctor said I should go do yoga. Since I was in Germany, all the yoga classes were in German. Apparently, that’s just how it works, right? [Laughs] I thought I would just follow what the other people did.
And, apparently, that’s just not how a real yoga practice is formed [laughs]. And so, because of that my sense is to do something absurd and continue to follow a path. I found a male performer and made a film, and I called it Black Yoga. Now, this man knew nothing about yoga—I, too, knew nothing about yoga [laughs]—but he was interested in ballet. I had an 8mm camera and I said, “Let’s do it, let’s make up black yoga.” I just started giving him moves to do and we made this film called Black Yoga. And by expanding on that was born this film, which is executed using five characters called The New Black Yoga and shot on 16mm film.
It’s this fun way to kind of revisit this idea of healing, or the creation of healing, using your own creative sensibility to invent a way to navigate complicated circumstances. And that’s how this film was born. That’s its origin story.
Katherine:
Thank you for that. I want to talk a little bit about the healing aspect of the piece. The installation that we have at the DMA has a series of branded rugs on the floor. Then you look at the film—it is a very serene film of beautiful movement on a beautiful beach at dusk—and there also appears to be crosshairs that are written into the sand. Then you notice that there are enigmatic runes that give a sense of mysticism but also of foreboding because it does appear that there are these crosshairs in the rugs. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the kind of symbolism that you’re dealing with.
Rashid:
You know, throughout my practice I’ve built an iconography, or a series of symbols and signs, that reference either personal or collective experience—for example, the rugs through branding, but also on the beach, a kind of simple technique of drawing in the sand. And one that you mentioned, Katherine, is the crosshairs.
I’m a child of the eighties. The day before yesterday, I went to see a play by an incredible playwright and screenwriter named Susan Laurie Parks—she happened to also write the script for a film that I made. But I was sitting behind Spike Lee. I love Spike Lee. I’m just a huge, huge fan of Spike Lee.
I have to say that, early on, I was quite obsessed with his films. One of his early films is a film many of you have probably seen called Do the Right Thing. I was quite young when it came out. But, there’s a song in it by a band called Public Enemy, and the song is called Fight the Power. I fell in love with Public Enemy. I thought that they were so brilliant. It was this radical discourse but it was also urban music and it was philosophy. Chuck D, who was the lead singer for the band, was this activist and this really brilliant character. On the cover of their albums, they often had this kind of crosshair—a gun sight. I remember asking myself over the course of looking at that album, listening to the music, and seeing how they employed the symbol—who was that sight for? Was the gun being pointed at them? Were they in the crosshairs or were they projecting the crosshairs onto whoever they were battling against? I’ve borrowed this symbol a lot in my work through branding.
Of course, Katherine, you mentioned there’s several rugs that lay on the floor. Well, my wife is Iranian and I always joke that my mother-in-law and I don’t have a ton in common. But she likes Persian rugs and I like Persian rugs. So I started using these things in my work—almost as a way of reflecting on this relationship that I was building with her, and these cultural signifiers and the possibility that cultural encampment, instincts, and signifiers can become global and employed in different ways and borrowed, sanctioned, and given agency in different languages. So I coated the floor in these Persian rugs and then I branded them with different symbols. I’m excited about how they become both legible and potentially mysterious, simultaneously.
Focus On: Rashid Johnson
The Dallas Museum of Art invites visitors to step into the artwork of renowned multidisciplinary artist Rashid Johnson in Focus On: Rashid Johnson, an installation showcasing Johnson’s multimedia work The New Black Yoga Installation. Gifted to the DMA by the artist in 2022, this installation combines a video projection and branded Persian rugs to create an experience that is, at once, intense and intimate. The film features five men performing an enigmatic dance of ballet, yoga, tai chi, and martial arts across a sun-soaked beach, exploring the complexity of personal and cultural identity. Their choreographed movements reflect Johnson’s ongoing meditations on Black masculinity and mysticism, as well as his investigations of the body in space. Rugs branded with crosshairs, a symbol that is etched into the sand in the video, are situated throughout the gallery, projecting the film’s combined sense of peace and foreboding into physical space.
About Rashid Johnson
Rashid Johnson’s practice encompasses a wide range of media, including sculpture, painting, drawing, filmmaking, and installation. Via a rich visual lexicon of coded symbolism and autobiographical materials, Johnson’s artwork conducts searing meditations on race and class, in addition to examining individual and shared cultural identities. The artist, who was born in Chicago in 1977, is perhaps best known for translating cultural experiences, most commonly that of Black Americans, through his unique visual language. Johnson was recognized as the 2022 honoree for his contributions to contemporary art at the 2022 TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art Gala and Auction, a charity auction that benefits both the DMA and amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research.
Edited by Trey Burns, Multimedia Producer, and Ellee McMeans, Communications Manager
Photos Trey Burns, Multimedia Producer
