Rindon Johnson

Rindon Johnson (b. 1990 on the unceded territories of the Ohlone people, San Francisco) is a multidisciplinary artist and author whose work is rooted in the primacy of language. His practice moves fluidly across sculpture, video, virtual and augmented reality, and poetry, allowing him to examine how language structures personal and collective realities. Grounded in a gender- and race-critical perspective, Johnson interrogates the technologies—industrial, poetic, digital—that shape captivity, value, and autonomy. Central to his work is the cow, a figure bred and engineered for human consumption; through cowhide, wood, stone, and digital environments, Johnson exposes the material afterlives of capitalism and the entanglement between bodies, nature, and systems of extraction.

Equally informed by poetry and emerging technologies, Johnson approaches virtual reality as an infinite, affective world-building space. He notes that in both VR and poetry, “worlds can be endless, limitless, emotional, tyrannical,” a condition he uses to explore climate grief, embodied knowledge, and the contradictions embedded in naming. His works often merge the deeply old with the hyper-contemporary—cowhide and code, weather systems and text—to probe how language, failure, and contradiction shape our perception of the environment and each other. Across mediums, Johnson constructs multi-layered installations that consider the emotional, ecological, and political dimensions of living within technologically mediated worlds.

Johnson’s work has been featured in the 60th Venice Biennale (2024), Cultuurcentrum Strombeek in Grimbergen (2025), Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Zurich, opening 2025), the Museum of American Art (Washington), and numerous institutions across Europe, Asia, and the United States. He has presented solo exhibitions at the Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai), CC Strombeek (Brussels), Chisenhale Gallery (London), The Albertinum (Dresden), The Julia Stoschek Collection (Düsseldorf), and SculptureCenter (Long Island City). A comprehensive solo exhibition of his work is currently on view at the Bergen Kunsthall in Norway.

Johnson is the author of four books of poetry and prose, and has delivered performances, readings, and lectures at institutions such as MoMA PS1 (2018) and KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (2019). His writing and artworks have been published in partnership with museums and cultural publications, including The New York Times. Johnson currently lives and works transnationally.