The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago will open a major survey of Rashid Johnson on November 7, 2026, tracing nearly three decades of the artist's practice. Titled A Poem for Deep Thinkers, the exhibition runs through April 25, 2027, and brings together more than 70 artworks spanning photography, video, large-scale installation, immersive painting and multimedia assemblage. For Johnson, who was born in Chicago in 1977 and now lives in New York, the show is a homecoming: it will be his third solo exhibition at the MCA, following an early-career presentation in 2002 and a mid-career survey in 2012.

The exhibition is built around Johnson's long-standing interest in freedom as a subject, and in how individuals and communities push back against established orders. Works on view include pieces from his New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club series, his Cosmic Slops paintings and other black-soap shelf works, spray-painted text pieces, and the Anxious Men and Broken Men series. His film and video work will screen at intervals through the galleries, including his latest film, Sanguine, from 2024, which looks at family ties through his father, brother and son, and features a poem by Amiri Baraka.

The show's subtitle is itself a reference to Baraka, borrowing the title of his 1977 poem. Across the galleries, Johnson draws on radical artistic and political movements of the 1960s through the 1990s, presenting himself as a student of art history, a translator of Black popular, literary and intellectual culture, and a participant in the age of globalisation and its aftereffects. A catalogue accompanies the exhibition, with essays by the organising curators and contributions from several writers and artists.

A Poem for Deep Thinkers was organised by Naomi Beckwith, deputy director and chief curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Andrea Karnes, chief curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The MCA presentation is curated by assistant curator Jack Schneider. Johnson has described the subject of his work as freedom, and the survey frames that idea through the fragile human psyche facing large historic forces.