Rashid Johnson Author

Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Robert 'Bob' Thompson (1937–1966) studied art at the University of Louisville. Around 1959, Thompson moved to New York, where he mingled with jazz musicians and encountered Allan Kaprow’s Happenings as well as other developments in conceptual art; however, the artist would eschew these experimentations to engage more intimately with works by the established masters of European art history. After mounting his first solo exhibition in New York at Red Grooms’s Delancey Street Museum in 1960, Thompson received a grant to go to Europe; he would travel to and settle in Paris, Ibiza, and Rome for short periods of time, viewing works of art at museums and galleries while maintaining his studio practice. He returned to New York in 1963 and joined Martha Jackson Gallery, where he presented solo shows in 1963 and 1965. He traveled to Rome in 1965, and after being hospitalized for appendicitis, he died in Italy at the age of twenty-eight.

Born in Chicago in 1977, Rashid Johnson is among an influential cadre of contemporary American artists whose work employs a wide range of media to explore themes of art history, individual and shared cultural identities, personal narratives, literature, philosophy, materiality, and critical history.

Ebony L. Haynes is a writer and curator from Toronto. She is based in New York, where she is a senior director at David Zwirner and curator of 52 Walker.