The broken nine

Born in Chicago in 1977, Rashid Johnson began his career as a photographer, studying at Columbia College before transferring to the Art Institute, Chicago. He quickly expanded his practice to embrace a wide range of media including sculpture, painting, drawing, filmmaking, and installation. Johnson is known for using a broad variety of everyday materials and objects that often allude to aspects of African American history, cultural identity, and the black body. Tropical plants, record covers, literature, shea butter, black soap, and wax are some of the materials that have featured repeatedly throughout his practice.

The Broken Nine 2021 was commissioned by the Gallery Met initiative at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and featured as part of an exhibition titled The Chorus. The exhibition featured two monumental mosaic works, each titled The Broken Nine (2020 and 2021 respectively), that were displayed on the Grand Tier and Dress Circle levels of the building. Comprising a large-scale mosaic wall relief that merges painting and sculpture, The Broken Nine is part of Johnson’s ‘Broken Men’ series, a body of work that he commenced in 2018, evolving out of his previous series ‘Anxious Men’ and ‘Anxious Audiences’.
‘Anxious Men’ began in 2015, reflecting challenges the artist faced both in his career and in his personal life. The roughly scrawled faces, with their spiralling eyes and tense grimaces, are often depicted in black soap and wax on white ceramic tile, their countenances scratched into the surface. In response racial tensions and the polarising political climate in the lead up to the 2016 American election, Johnson developed the individual portraits into ‘Anxious Audiences’ where the scribbled, apprehensive faces appear en masse in a grid format. The ‘Broken Men’ mosaics followed in 2018, featuring fractured, square-faced figures pieced together from fragments of ceramic, mirror and tile, standing alone, in groups, and in crowds. When speaking of the ‘Broken Men’ series, Johnson has noted: ‘I’m conscious of how the [#MeToo] movement has effectively started breaking down the structure of machismo and how masculinity has functioned as a dominant force. When I call these works Broken Men, I didn’t intend to gender or race them. It was meant as a stand in for the human condition’.

The figures in The Broken Nine were inspired by Peruvian paintings and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus published in 1818. Johnson has noted that the figures are semi-autobiographical, saying: ‘I’m trying to illustrate tons of different people and at the same time they’re probably all me’.
Johnson’s The Broken Five 2019 is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Other works are held in collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.