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This fall, MoMA PS1 will present Hard Art, a major exhibition that examines the legacy of abstract painting by Black artists in the US from 1969 to today. Hard Art features over forty artists and juxtaposes historical paintings by practitioners who came to prominence in the 1970s with recent conceptually driven practices that incorporate sculpture, video, sound, and painting. Organized thematically, the exhibition traces the legacy of three generations of artists including Frank Bowling, Mark Bradford, Peter Bradley, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Ed Clark, Melvin Edwards, Jennie C. Jones, Joe Overstreet, and Raymond Saunders, alongside new and recent works by Aria Dean, Torkwase Dyson, Nikita Gale, Suzanne Jackson, Rindon Johnson, Caroline Kent, Carolyn Lazard, Eric N. Mack, Charisse Pearlina Weston, and SoiL Thornton, among others.

Together, these cross-generational conversations emphasize the enduring relevance and increasing urgency of abstraction in shaping the current political imaginary. The exhibition’s title derives from Bradley’s description of The DeLuxe Show, which leveraged abstraction’s perceived opacity and complexity as a prompt for deepened engagement with art. The presentation will be accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring essays by Connie Butler, Hannah Black, Jessica Bell Brown, Torkwase Dyson, Rindon Johnson, and Erich Kessel, among other contributors, as well as an illustrated chronology of significant museum exhibitions by June Kitahara and Sheldon Gooch.

max goelitz is pleased to invite Hauser & Wirth on the occasion of Various Others 2026. The exhibition places works by contemporary artists Lukas Heerich and Rindon Johnson in dialogue with selected early works on paper and a painting by Eva Hesse. Across generations, these artists share an interest in material experimentation, occupying a space in which form emerges through process and reveals both physical and conceptual tensions. Within this presentation, Heerich and Johnson draw on Hesse’s practice as a point of departure, reflecting on and extending themes that resonate throughout her painting and works on paper.

the archaic
resonates in the now,
humming under LED lights.
a longing machine,
wears algorithms like skin.
the data of a home
never fully left,
never fully found.

my mouth opens
and spills static:
I’ve never had
an original experience.

Close to the Clouds: Encountering Digital Diasporas features Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Zainab Aliyu, Rindon Johnson, Lauren Lee McCarthy and Kyle McDonald, Rebeca Romero, and Tianyi Sun and Fiel Guhit—who consider how the formation of collective identities takes place utilizing technology and the internet. How does it feel to encounter the friction and slippage between prevailing ideas of “what your inherited cultural heritage should be,” and the illusion of choice created by interacting with algorithms to access niche communities? These personal and collective experiences, mediated by our relationship to technology, serve as metaphors for how we can store, access, and deploy our memories to process and generate new contexts.

Curated by Kathy Cho, 2024–2025 Curator-in-Residence

Bergen Kunsthall is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Rindon Johnson, running concurrently with the festival exhibition 2025. Johnson, an artist and poet, explores how language, materiality, and space shape perception and value, informed by history, economics, and the limits of language. For this exhibition Johnson presents works that extend his ongoing investigations into autonomy, surveillance, and material histories. The title, drawn from archaeology, reflects how meaning is shaped by context and discovery.

For his exhibition at CC Strombeek, Johnson will explore the history and implications of the fabled wood type mahogany and its contemporary usage, for instance in furniture. A valued material, mahogany has passed through many hands, yet the islands where it grows bear the scars of its absence, left vulnerable by the loss of these protective trees.

Best Synthetic Answer will open on September 21st, 2024.

Rindon Johnson’s Symbiosis Hypnosis is a video game grounded in the evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis’ (1938-2011) symbiosis theories. Margulis provided valuable theories about the evolution of life and the origin of modern cells challenging central tenets of neo-Darwinism. She argued that inherited variation, significant in evolution, does not come mainly from random mutations, rather, new tissues, organs, and even new species evolve primarily through the long-lasting intimacy of strangers. She suggests that the fusion of genomes in symbioses followed by natural selection leads to increasingly complex levels of individuality.

Rindon Johnson has been invited to Biennale Arte 2024 curated by Adriano Pedrosa.

The 2024 edition will focus on AI and is co-organized by Michael Connor, Co-Executive Director of Rhizome, and Xinran Yuan, independent curator and producer. The first in-person edition to be held since 2019, 7x7 2024 draws together creative pairings from across disciplines. The collaborators will consider how AI may alter our understanding of love, humor, and improvisation; biology, politics, and histories.

New solo exhibition @ Max Goeltiz, Berlin

For Les lichens ne mentent jamais / Lichens Never Lie, Rindon Johnson presents “We can leave anytime, day or night (let us begin we have much further to go)”. In this text-based work, created with the aid of an AI voice, he intertwines components of artificial intelligence and lichens to confront climate change, addressing them not as opposites to be engaged with on separate horizons but as potential tools to inform one another.

New Essay: What happens when we cross over to the other side? In relation to the phenomenon of transshipment – the risky and at times illicit practice of transferring cargo from one ship to another – artist and poet Rindon Johnson ruminates on borders and bodies that remain in flux.

Artist Rindon Johnson joins Rail contributor Ksenia M. Soboleva for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading.

An exhibition in homage to the Cuvier's beaked whale, Ziphius cavirostris, featuring new sculptures in stained glass, a work in cow leather and bleach exposed to the elements, and a new video game that places players in the perceptual apparatus of the whale. 

An installation and choreography of new works in leather, furniture and mirror @ GUTS

Exhibition in Dresden opening 25 August where I'll present new works for the occasion of winning the Ernst-Rietschel-Kunstpreis für Skulptur 2022

A collaboration between the Critical Poetics Research Group at Nottingham Trent University and Nottingham Contemporary, this series of talks and readings investigates poetic ecologies in the Anthropocene. Exploring ideas from weeds and water to eco-trauma and deep time, and featuring some of the most important international creative-critical voices working today, the talks and readings aim to open up new conversations about entanglement, coexistence, resilience and sustainability.

Curated by Yaby. Participating artists are Aria Dean, Christopher Aque, Claudia Pagès and Rindon Johnson.

Titled Quiet as It’s Kept, the 2022 Biennial features an intergenerational and interdisciplinary group of sixty-three artists and collectives whose dynamic works reflect the challenges, complexities, and possibilities of the American experience today.

Lifes is conceived as a durational sequence that unfolds over time. A cycle of audio, video, and live performance repeats at the top of each hour, but there is no singular or optimal way to experience the exhibition. Intermittent dance and music performances interrupt the implied stability of the schedule. The whole assembly becomes an orchestrated cacophony of disparate parts and competing interests. Any moments of dissonance that arise within the container of the exhibition reflect the lived conditions and working methods of artists across disciplines.