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Self-Portrait as the Professor of Astronomy, Miscegenation, and Critical Theory at "The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club" Center for Graduate Studies
Self-Portrait as the Professor of Astronomy, Miscegenation, and Critical Theory at "The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club" Center for Graduate Studies
© Rashid Johnson. Courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.

Self-Portrait as the Professor of Astronomy, Miscegenation, and Critical Theory at "The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club" Center for Graduate Studies

Artist (Born in Chicago, Illinois, 1977)
Date2009
MediumLambda print
DimensionsOverall: 51 1/2 × 90 inches (130.8 × 228.6 cm)
Each Sheet: 51 1/2 × 45 inches (130.8 × 114.3 cm)
ClassificationsPrint
Credit LinePromised gift of Marjorie (P’16, P’19, P’19) and Michael Levine (B.S.’84, P’16, P’19, P’19)
Object numberL.29.2014.1
Collections
  • PHOTOGRAPHY
  • ART OF THE UNITED STATES
  • WORKS ON PAPER
Edition5 + 2 AP
State4
Label TextThis work belongs to a series of photographs by Rashid Johnson that explores the practices of portraiture, representation and cultural production. In Self-Portrait, he invents a mystical academic world in which the artist effortlessly and humorously combines and masters three unrelated subject matters (astronomy, miscegenation, and critical theory). His fictitious “Escapist Social and Athletic Club” allows for a free exploration of identity, enhanced by his fantastical double image. The artist is not a flattened representation of race, but a combination of contradictions and layers. He is simultaneously a scholar and an everyday man, spiritual and rational, a buttoned-up conservative and proponent of afrocentrism. Self-Portrait speaks to the artist’s own experience as a middle-class black man growing up in the US and working through the many spaces he occupies both socially and professionally.
ProvenancePurchased from Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago (2014). Monique Meloche Gallery acquired the work directly from the artist.