Rashid Johnson Quotes

My father owned a small company, called Gundel Electronics, where he did community band radio and some repair stuff.
My father ran a CB radio business. I grew up in a cluttered space that was filled with radios and antennas. It felt alien.
My mother introduced me to more academic-minded writers, Cornel West and Skip Gates. In her library, I came across, when I was very young, Harold Cruse's 'The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,' which is like a bible of Negro intellectuals from Frederick Douglass to Amiri Baraka.
Oh, yeah, I'm all about ritual.
Race, class, childhood experience, the books I found on my mother's bookshelf, the albums I found in my father's basement - these things are all part of who I am and will always be a part of my work.
'The New Black Yoga' originally was born from a film that I had made prior called 'Black Yoga.' And I was living in Berlin at the time, dealing with a lot of anxiety and stress around the project that I was working on, which is not an abnormal thing for me.
The thing that turned out to be interesting about CB radios was the ability to call out in the world with anonymity. You choose your handle. Race and class become non-signifiers.
The way that light hits objects in life, three-dimensional objects before you photograph them, is really the story of photography.
The way that light hits objects, I think, is one of the more important things that sculpture and photography share.
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.
What I really hoped to do with my work was to at least be able to define my relationship to race.
When I was young, I remember feeling a real thirst for opportunities around the arts, for learning about how artists function and how institutions work.
When I was younger, I remember there was a really famous book, and it was called 'The People Could Fly.' And so this idea of, kind of like, black characters kind of jumping into space and kind of the challenge that they presented to gravity I thought was really interesting.
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.
You can really learn a lot from young people and the way they view the world.
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Rashid Johnson
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