Rashid Johnson’s mixed-media work The Broken Five has been acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The painting debuted at the artist’s solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in New York. The painting is the first unique work by Johnson to enter the institution’s collection. The Broken Five has not been seen in any gallery since its first showing.
The Broken Five, incorporates ceramic, mirrored glass, spray paint, black soap, and other materials. It has recently gone on view in a suite of galleries on the museum’s second floor where works by Jackson Pollock, Sam Gilliam, Joan Mitchell, Willem de Kooning, and other marquee names of the postwar era hang alongside abstract works by artists of more recent generations.
The Met has been working on buying The Broken Five since it went on view at Hauser & Wirth. The pandemic has slowed the acquisition process somewhat, and the museum is still finalizing the purchase. Ian Alteveer, a curator of modern and contemporary art at the Met, played a vital role in acquisition of the painting. According to him, the work represents the artist in the collection in a really impactful and robust way. He said, “It is a kind of kaleidoscopic vision that incorporates so much of [Johnson’s] practice today—something that is a painting and a sculpture all at once. The Broken Five is a wall relief that carries with it all this weight of history in his work but also speaks to the emergence over the past six years of these ‘anxious’ and ‘broken’ figures in the practice.”
The five figures in the painting have a “semi-autobiographical” quality to them. The work as a whole also addresses how the world bears witness to issues of racial justice, police violence, environmental crises, and other socio-political concerns. According to Alteveer, the acquisition also aligns with the collection’s “deep interest in augmenting and centering Black artists,” which “is a tradition we’ve been building on, I think really successfully, in recent years,” he said
The Broken Five will remain on view in the coming months, and Alteveer pointed out that one of the images of the work that Johnson posted to Instagram features Gilliam’s 1968 Carousel State, an unstretched acrylic on canvas painting affixed to the wall.
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