Rashid Johnson

What I really hoped to do with my work was to at least be able to define my relationship to race.

I say that I suffer from what Rosalind Krauss was calling the post-medium condition, where an artist essentially employs several mediums in order to bring to life whatever specific ideas that they have. For me it's always been that way.

I've always been interested in this idea of a privileged life, probably because it's something I hadn't seen much of.

The way that light hits objects in life, three-dimensional objects before you photograph them, is really the story of photography.

The New Black Yoga' originally was born from a film that I had made prior called 'Black Yoga.' And I was living in Berlin at the time, dealing with a lot of anxiety and stress around the project that I was working on, which is not an abnormal thing for me.

I wanted my art to deal with very formal concerns and to deal with very material concerns, and to deal with antecedents and art history, which for me go very far beyond just the influence of African-American artists.

My father ran a CB radio business. I grew up in a cluttered space that was filled with radios and antennas. It felt alien.

The whole ability to look at the complexity of race and any sort of associated -ism and still find humor, that's a very interesting space.

I attempted to do yoga in German, and it was not particularly successful. So at that time, I started thinking about the idea of just movement and how I could move to de-stress.

My father owned a small company, called Gundel Electronics, where he did community band radio and some repair stuff.

Race, class, childhood experience, the books I found on my mother's bookshelf, the albums I found in my father's basement - these things are all part of who I am and will always be a part of my work.

I was born in Evanston, about three blocks away from the Chicago border. My mother, at the time, was finishing her Ph.D. in African History at Northwestern University. Soon after my birth, my parents split, and my father moved to Wicker Park, which is on the north side of the city.