For the duration of his artistic residency in the small town of Bruton in Somerset, Rashid Johnson will be sending his five-year-old son to the local school. “We did have some concerns,” says the artist. “You know, sending him to a school where there were likely to be no children of colour. I hope it’s OK. I hope he doesn’t feel alone, out of place.”

There may be a degree of projection in this paternal anxiety. We’re speaking just a couple of days into Johnson’s visit to the West Country, where he will be in residence at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in Bruton, but he’s already given his show a title. He’s calling it Stranger, in a nod to James Baldwin’s essay Stranger in the Village, the influential African American author’s account of his visit to Leukerbad in 1951. “From all available evidence,” Baldwin writes, “no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came.” He goes on to describe being followed in the streets by groups of giggling children who shout “Neger! Neger!” and women who want to touch his hair.

“I’ve travelled pretty extensively,” says Johnson. “I’ve been to west Africa, Asia, I’ve spent time in Europe. But when I go to a place that feels this distant, when I walk into a store, I’m like, ‘I’m a stranger again.’ It’s not about racism per se, but difference on a more existential level.”

One of Johnson’s paintings in the show Stranger at Hauser & Wirth Somerset. Photograph: Gareth Iwan Jones/The Guardian

Bruton in 2017 is not Leukerbad in 1951, though. As the gallery is at pains to point out, Hauser & Wirth came here to join a cultural community, rather than create one. And this area of Somerset does have a distinctly cosmopolitan feel. Pub chalkboards advertise beer, skittles and flat whites. The Glastonbury festival, held nearby, has been drawing artists from all over the world for the last 40 years. And, although the surrounding countryside remains predominantly white, Bristol, less than an hour away, has had black residents since at least the 17th century.

So does that make the show’s title a jetlagged snap judgment, an overstatement? Johnson tactfully encourages me to check my privilege. “Regardless of where you are, the psychological aspect of otherness will follow you,” he says, but adds: “I’ve never seen blackness as a ghettoising concept. I think it can be very empowering. It’s fed my understanding of culture, identity and presence, both socially and psychologically.”

Johnson grew up in Chicago, in an “Afrocentric household”. His mother was a professor of African history and his stepfather was Nigerian. It was partly his early experiences visiting Africa that made him keenly aware of the rootlessness of his own identity. “I realised quite quickly that I wasn’t an African. And that was a really interesting thing, because I’d thought, in one way, that I was going home.”

In America, his blackness conferred on him a certain set of assumptions. In Africa, this was still the case – but the assumptions were different. “Ask an African if an African American is an African,” he says, “and you’ll get a potentially complicated answer.”

So Johnson became an explorer of his own sense of otherness. Earlier pieces, such as I Talk White or the New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club (Emmett), examine directly the possibility of a black voice in the canon of western art. More recently, his work plays with the cliches of exoticism: tribal masks, collages of palms, black wax and metal frameworks peopled with houseplants and sculptural mounds of Shea butter.

The greenery fights back … the artist with one of his steel-and-plant island sculptures. Photograph: Gareth Iwan Jones/The Guardian

“I always think about who gets to employ these objects. There has been a long history of criticism of Picasso for using African imagery. And I think, ‘How does my employment of these symbols function, seeing as I’m not African?’ Does my skin colour, the diasporic nature of my condition, allow me to use these images with any more integrity than any other artist?” A recent exploration of his ancestry led to the discovery that his genes were 30% European. “Does that 30% not get to engage with the discourse?” he asks.

All this makes him an ideal candidate for the Somerset residency. A tendency to produce contrast is an inevitable byproduct of this gallery’s oddness in the roll-call of Hauser & Wirth properties: New York, London, Zurich, Los Angeles … Bruton. As Johnson acknowledges, he is only the most recent in a fairly long line of fish out of water. Pipilotti Rist, the inaugural artist-in-residence when the gallery opened in 2012, was almost certainly the only Swiss video artist in the village. After Johnson will be Koo Jeong A, South Korean builder of phosphorescent skateparks. Also, I’d hazard, a first.

“There’s a real sense of the high and the low here,” he says. “There are some very cultured, liberal-minded, thoughtful characters here, and then there’s people who are more the salt of the earth.” Again, the fact that people can inhabit the same space, but different universes, is precisely the kind of tension that Johnson’s work is designed to expose. “I think you realise that there isn’t a single narrative for any place,” he says. “You want to paint these pictures, but they just don’t exist.”

His last show, at the David Kordansky Gallery in LA, was called Islands, and maybe one way to see Johnson would be as a trafficker in symbols connecting the European and African identity, such as the palm trees in his collages. “Growing up in Chicago, the idea of getting to a place that was tropical was all about opportunity: ‘I made it to somewhere Caribbean!’” Many of us share the idea of what that exotic location looks like. You see this beach, or this set of palm trees, and you just imagine you’re going to have a Corona there.”



Rashid Johnson and son Julius out and about in Bruton, Somerset. Photograph: Gareth Iwan Jones/The Guardian

I ask if Somerset presents a challenge to the universality of his work. In the America of Breitbart and Black Lives Matter, the construction of an authentic racial identity feels like a hot topic. But would that have the same resonance for a British audience? Johnson surprises me with another polite deflection.

“There’s this assumption here that I am not a Trump supporter. Every single person I have talked to, who would want to engage in this conversation, has fearlessly spoken about their dislike for Trump, without any intimation that I could possibly be responsible for his being where he is. There’s something quite interesting about how my presence alone coexists with a liberal vocabulary, without my having to speak at all.”

Fancy a Corona? … another work in the Stranger show. Photograph: Gareth Iwan Jones/The Guardian

What Johnson points out in his art (and, to this writer’s embarrassment, in person) is the extent to which the perception of otherness produces a weird kind of invisibility. Baldwin, writing in Stranger in the Village, says: “The black man insists, by whatever means he finds at his disposal, that the white man cease to regard him as an exotic rarity and recognise him as a human being.” This quiet insistence on articulating his identity, in all its ambivalence, is central to Johnson’s project. The people who see the Shea butter and the palms and write him off as an Afrocentric artist will be both missing the point and proving it.

We speak again a couple of weeks later and I get a sense that his view of the place has changed. The work has moved on, too. The steel structures that generally dominate the greenery have been turned inside out, so that the greenery dominates the steel: it’s a reflection, says Johnson, of the English countryside outside his window.

He tells me about a taxi driver he’s met in town. The man hated contemporary art, but has been converted by the artists he has taken to and from the gallery. “He absolutely loves it now. He feels like he’s part of the conversation.” You can tell the story delights Johnson, an artist who insists on everyone’s right to be seen.



Tellingly, Johnson also allowed his own preconceptions to be upset. His son has made friends. “He’s been really embraced by the community,” he says. “When he’s happy, I’m happy.”