NEW YORK, NY.- Presented by Friends of the High Line, High Line Art announces that acclaimed artist Rashid Johnson is presenting his first public commission in New York City, a new site-specific work installed among the vegetation of the High Line at Little West 12th Street. On view this spring, the sculpture transforms as it interacts with the surrounding plant life over the course of its almost year-long residency in the park. Titled Blocks, the work is on view from May 2015 to March 2016.

Inspired by a childhood steeped in African American cultural influences, Rashid Johnson creates layered artworks that engage a conversation between personal biography and the implied gravitas of larger cultural and historical narratives. Johnson works predominantly in mixed media sculptures and paintings, combining bare materials such as mirror, wood, and shea butter with loaded iconic objects including record covers, CB radios, historical books, and common domestic objects. Throughout his career, Johnson has explored the ways in which we form our sense of belonging to races and communities, investigating the relationship between familiar objects and identity.

For his High Line Commission, Johnson built one of his minimalist three-dimensional steel black grids, which houses a variety of objects including busts painted to resemble shea butter (a material commonly used by the artist), and acts as a living greenhouse as plants on the High Line begin to intertwine with the sculpture over the year of its installation. Playing with forms taken from the Minimalist tradition – Sol LeWitt’s white open cubes come to mind – Johnson turns them into a reflection on blackness by breaking the rational structure open and embedding loaded objects within it.

Installed in an oblong island of plants growing between pathways on the High Line just south of The Standard, High Line, the sculpture will change over the course of its installation, the empty rectilinear vessel becoming a horticultural container as the seasons pass. The work reflects the artist’s ongoing interest in a line from a book by Lawrence Weiner called “Something to Put Something On,” in which the concept “table” is explained as “something to put something on.” This semiotic explication resonates with Johnson, who pushes its implications toward thinking about the ways in which lives, cultures, and historical arcs are a mere practice of putting some things on top other things that are imagined to be taken as given, such as the exemplary case of the table.

Cecilia Alemani, the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art says “We are thrilled to be presenting Rashid Johnson’s first public commission in New York City. The installation expands the artist’s interest in questioning the tradition of minimalism by integrating organic forces within it. I look forward to seeing how Blocks will interact with the living vegetation of the High Line and what happens when the domestic space is brought out into the public realm.”