What happens when an artist follows his instincts? In this film, artist Rashid Johnson charts a decade-long aesthetic and professional development from his early portrait photographs to his later conceptually-based sculptures made from glass, wood, and tile. Johnson is “a materialist at heart” and his earliest work—painterly, monochromatic photographs of African-American men made with obsolete 19th-Century techniques—evidence a career-long fascination with materials and processes. The photographs also unexpectedly get him his first gallery show while still an unknown undergraduate student at Columbia College in Chicago. It’s the start of a successful exhibition run, including shows at the prestigious Venice Biennale and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, that continues to this day.

At Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York City, Johnson helps install large-scaled, formally exacting sculptural works made with what have become signature materials like shea butter, black soap and wax, and zebra skin. Though those materials evoke Johnson’s own complicated relationship to African-American identity and culture, the artists says, “My black-ness…[has] a strong effect on how my work is born and around the conversation that inevitably will happen, but I don’t think that it’s really the sum off all what my work is. And I think formally I’m trying to approach art-making in a way that is part of the bigger history of art.”