Rashid Johnson

Growing up in Chicago, there was a very particular type of home that would display the black Jesus figure. It wasn't a radical home. You wouldn't find these in a Black Panther house. There's still a strong allegiance to Christianity.

I have an investment in the signifying aspects of the material as well as an understanding of antecedent bodies of work. That informs the way I make marks and make decisions.

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.

I'd begun to collect things that were lying in piles on the floor of my studio. I had run out of space, and I started to build shelves. I turned around one day and realized that that was the vehicle for carrying so many of the things that I was looking at and talking about, so they went from the walls to the works.

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.

I've always had an interest in complicating the way that we perceive the black character, whether it's the black academic or scholar or activist or black intellectual.

I can bring in all these different components, and I marry these components, and I let them get traversed by the viewer, who reorganizes them.

My father had a big brick cell phone, before anyone had a cell phone, because he was really just into that kind of thing - communication devices. I grew up between my father's laboratory and my mother's library.

As an artist, I've always felt most comfortable outside of the art supply store. So domestic materials are the ones that most help inform what I'm trying to talk about and our familiarity as a whole - kind of the collective us, I guess.

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.

My composition often goes toward the black middle class or the black super-wealthy or strong historical black figures.

I don't have any other skills. Some artists say that to mean that their embodied passion for art gave them no choice. I say it, very specifically, to say that I really didn't have any other options.