Artist Rashid Johnson's sculpted grids contain the anxieties that rattle him

All hail the grid, the shelving that holds our stuff, the x-axis and y-axis that bring order to our data.

Some may see you as cold, confining and inhuman, but I don't think Rashid Johnson would subscribe to that view. 

His art, on display in "Hail We Now Sing Joy" at the Milwaukee Art Museum, relies on grids both to hold objects and materials that he cares about and to contain the anxieties that rattle him. 

During a recent media preview and tour, Johnson discussed how pleased he was to be the first contemporary artist to take over MAM's entire feature exhibit space — as opposed to being discussed as the first African-American artist do so. 

The massive sculpture "Antoine's Organ" embodies the situation that Johnson discussed of being black while not wanting to be completely defined or pigeonholed as such. "As any kind of American, as any kind of global citizen, you are subject to some degree … to what everyone thinks you are," he said.

More than 10 feet tall, the framework holds hundred of plants and ceramic vessels created by Johnson. The rows are dotted with big yellowish hunks of shea butter, a recurring material in Johnson's art. The artist has also interspersed books that have engaged him, including Richard Wright's "Native Son," Paul Beatty's "The Sellout," Debra Dickerson's "The End of Blackness" and Randall Kennedy's "Sellout" — writing that grapples with the situation, including the possible futures, of being African-American. But to signal that this is neither Johnson's only concern nor the sole source of his tension, he also includes a Søren Kierkegaard book on anxiety and the Alcoholics Anonymous "Big Book." 

"Antoine's Organ" makes me imagine a botany pod on an interstellar ship, a tidy, organized attempt to bring essential elements from home on a journey that may take generations. 

Beyond its size, what distinguishes "Antoine's Organ" from past grids that Johnson has sculpted is the upright piano inside it. After getting to know Antoine Baldwin, a young musician in New York, Johnson decided he had to include Baldwin in something he was doing. So the sculpture is not fully activated and illuminated until a musician is inside it, playing. 

Note that Johnson titled it "Antoine's Organ," not piano. If the plants and ceramics and books collectively represent the artist's brain, as Johnson mused, then a playing pianist can be seen as the heart that brings pulsing life to this work. 

MAM will feature local musicians playing inside "Antoine's Organ" at scheduled times throughout the exhibit. Visit mam.org/rashid-johnson/antoines-organ for info.  

The exhibit also includes three other series of works by Johnson. I found his "Anxious Audience" series the most compelling. Johnson pours liquid black soap and wax on white ceramic tile, then scratches a wiry, worried face through the cooling mixture. "They were self-portraits, cathartic moments," he said during the preview tour. His young son, seeing the rectangular faces, dubbed them robots, a perfectly reasonable interpretation.

Johnson has arranged the faces in 4-by-9 grids, but each grid has at least one empty spot, and in each case my eye was pulled immediately to that absence, and to wonder about the desaparecido it represents. In some alternative universe, there is a Talking Heads album with one of Johnson's anxious grids on its cover.

Johnson refers to himself as a child of the Western art tradition, and talks with pleasure about artists who have mattered to him, such as Sol LeWitt, Jean Dubuffet and Carl Andre. In a bold gesture, his exhibit includes a low, scarred wooden table on which the artist has heaped blocks of shea butter, an extract from the nut of the African shea tree that is widely used in lotions and cosmetics. He uses it regularly in his art, noting that "materials and their ability to heal" matter to him. The yellowish tinge of the blocks also suggests human fat viewed after a surgeon cuts a body open. Johnson exposes the quivering, insoluble raw material threaded through his creations.

IF YOU GO

"Rashid Johnson: Hail We Now Sing Joy" continues through Sept. 17 at the Milwaukee Art Museum, 700 N. Art Museum Drive. Info: mam.org.