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    Rashid Johnson:

    Crosshair Brand
    2011

    Painted steel and red oak
    (brand) 11.5 x 11.5 x 20 inches
    (base) 1.5 x 15 x 25 inches
    Edition of 20
    SOLD OUT

    Crosshair Brand is a sculpture in two parts that presents a tool Rashid Johnson uses to mark the surfaces of many large scale paintings. The shape of the brand may take on many different abstract and representational forms, including circles, diamonds, palm trees, and the crosshair being a recurrent motif throughout his most recent work.

    Johnson engages with racial identity in ways that insist on fluidity and contradiction. Johnson uses materials such as steel, poured wax, and shea butter, while juxtaposing relics and artifacts in an approach that flirts with the shamanistic. Concerned equally with 20th Century art history, popular culture and African American intellectual history, Johnson cites Sun Ra, Joseph Beuys, Rosalind Krauss, Richard Pryor, Hans Haacke, Carl Andre among his influences.

    Rashid Johnson was born in Chicago in 1977, and lives and works in New York. SculptureCenter commissioned Johnson's first solo museum exhibition in New York, Smoke and Mirrors, in 2009. His recent solo exhibitions include Hauser & Wirth, St. Moritz, Switzerland (2019); Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI (2017); The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO (2017); Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia (2016); The Drawing Center, New York, (2015); The High Line, New York NY (2015); High Museum of Art, Atlanta GA (2013), among many others. Recent group exhibitions include Grace Wales Bonner. A Time for Dreams, Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, (2019); Groundings, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2019); Collection: a Selection of African Artworks, Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France (2018); Michael Jackson. On the Wall, Grand Palais, Paris, France (2018); and An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney's Collection, 1940-2017, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY (2017).

    SculptureCenter commissioned Johnson's first solo museum exhibition in New York, Smoke and Mirrors, in 2009.

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