Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks is the most comprehensive documentation of the New York-based artist’s work to date. Johnson 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. The inaugural volume in the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s 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 with an excerpt from Paul Beatty’s trenchant and comic coming-of-age novel The White Boy Shuffle.

Published by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Clothbound hardcover, 96 pages. 77 color. 8 x 10 in.

Detail Rashid Johnson, Self Portrait as the Professor of Astronomy, Miscegenation and Critical Theory at the New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club Center for Graduate Studies, 2008. Lambda print, 51 1/2 x 73 in. (130.8 x 185.4 cm). Collection of Marilyn and Larry Fields, Chicago.