Rashid Johnson: New Poetry

At Whitney Exhibitions, Rashid Johnson presents *New Poetry*, an installation that treats the museum as a room for thinking aloud. The work draws on his recurring vocabulary—text, objects, and materials that carry personal and social history—and lets their meanings accumulate through proximity rather than narrative. In New York, where Johnson’s career has unfolded alongside debates about identity, labor, and cultural inheritance, the piece reads as a local chapter in an ongoing conversation. Its restraint is the point: it asks viewers to do interpretive work instead of receiving a single message.