“Fear is a stabilizer and anxiety is an alert system… there’s so many things happening today that my spidey sense goes off, and that’s my anxiety, and I’m happy to have it.”
—Rashid JohnsonThe recurring anxious faces that populate Rashid Johnson’s work initially emerged in his Anxious Men series, which was first shown at his eponymous exhibition at the Drawing Center, New York City, in 2015. Entirely in black and white, the series began with singular portraits of block-like gnarling faces. However, over the course of the 2016 presidential election, they grew and multiplied to form large-scale grid compositions. Describing this rigid formation, which we see return in Untitled Anxious Print, the New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote how “the frazzled faces are stacked like pictures in a yearbook, or perhaps men in a cellblock. They bring to mind the work of Basquiat, Dubuffet and Gary Simmons, but mainly they surround us with an arena filled with angry or fearful spectators.” Johnson recalled that the series responded to the ongoing police shootings of unarmed black men and the divisive social tensions surrounding the presidential election at the time. Creating the portraits served as a cathartic means to delve into his fears, the artist explained; and after showcasing them, he felt a sense of relief upon knowing he was not alone.
