Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks

Message to Our Folks is the most comprehensive documentation of New York-based artist Rashid Johnson's work to date. Johnson (born 1977) explores the complexities and contradictions of black identity in the United States, incorporating commonplace objects from his childhood in a process he describes as "hijacking the domestic," and transforming materials such as wood, mirrors, tiles, rugs, CB radios, shea butter and plants into conceptually loaded and visually compelling works that shatter assumptions about the homogeneity of black subjecthood. Published in the new MCA Monographs series, Message to Our Folks accompanies the artist's first major solo museum exhibition and features essays by curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm, novelist and critic Touré and art historian Ian Bourland and an excerpt from Paul Beatty's trenchant and comic coming-of-age novel, The White Boy Shuffle.