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F ew exhibitions have enjoyed as much pre-buzz as the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth's "Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers," which opened in March after a much lauded nine-month run at the Guggenheim New York. The show chronicles three decades of the multidisciplinary artist's oeuvre, including painting, sculpture, installation (with wondrous live plants), photography, and film — resonant works that address themes of contemporary life such as masculinity, empathy, self-care, family, race, and sobriety. The title references a poem by political activist Amiri Baraka, a writer and teacher who inspires Johnson's practice. Close to 90 works touch on key moments in his career, including a site- specific installation, a sculpture outside the museum's walls, and two works activated through live performances THE STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM. © RASHID JOHNSON. EVIE MARIE BISHOP during the run of the show. Johnson was born in Chicago in 1977. He earned a BA in photography from Columbia College, followed by graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His breakout moment came in 2001 when Thelma Golden included him in her show "Freestyle" at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Since then, his works have been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Photography, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, D.C. Johnson's thoughts on art history, philosophy, literature, and music — all key to his art making — coalesce in "A Poem for Deep Thinkers," which took nearly three years to plan and is poised to be one of the biggest blockbusters in our region this year. The Modern's chief curator Andrea Karnes co-curated the exhibition alongside Naomi Beckwith, deputy director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation. We caught up with Karnes as she prepped for opening night — a veritable magnet for local and international art-world connoisseurs. Rashid Johnson also shared some insights into the Fort Worth iteration of the show. Rashid Johnson New themes you want to explore. RJ: I don't know if I experience themes as entirely new so much as evolving. The concerns tend to remain fairly consistent: questions around interior life, vulnerability, anxiety, love, and the ways we try to care for ourselves and one another. What changes is the lens through which those ideas are approached. Lately I've been thinking a lot about directionlessness — not necessarily as confusion, but as a productive state. A condition where certainty falls away, and you're forced to sit with complexity and contradiction. In some ways, it feels very contemporary, but it also feels deeply human. I'm interested in how that state produces new forms of intimacy, new forms of abstraction, and new ways of thinking about freedom. I'm also continuing to think about the space between figuration and abstraction, what a friend of mine has called "ambient figuration." The figure doesn't disappear, but it becomes a kind of atmosphere. A psychological condition rather than a literal body. Antoine's Organ, 2016 / 2026 Detail of runway floor at Pompidou Center, "Paris to India," Louis Vuitton Spring Summer 2026 Rashid Johnson's lauded show at the Modern speaks to contemporary life. Billy Fong speaks to the artist and curator. Deep Thinking Rashid Johnson, Untitled Broken Men, 2019 78