NEW YORK, NY.- The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s landmark 1959 building, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, has always presented singular opportunities for living artists to engage with its sculptural spiraling ramp and central oculus illuminated by a domed skylight.

“It’s an institution that gives agency to solo exhibitions in ways unlike any other museum,” said Rashid Johnson, a multidisciplinary artist who served on the Guggenheim’s board from 2016 to 2023. “It’s a collaboration between the artist and inherently the architect.”

Johnson will take on the entirety of Wright’s dramatic rotunda in a midcareer survey that opens April 18 and runs through Jan. 18, 2026. Titled “A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” it will include almost 90 works in photography, video, film, mixed-media paintings, sculpture and installation that scale the space and explore themes of identity, social alienation and rebirth in ways both political and deeply personal.

Johnson, 47, is one of the most influential voices of his generation and has expanded the cultural conversation around race in America through his art, advocacy and institutional stewardship. He stepped down as a Guggenheim trustee last year before proceeding with plans for this show to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest.

(Similarly, Kasseem Dean, a producer and DJ known as Swizz Beatz, resigned from the board of the Brooklyn Museum before its exhibition “Giants: Art From the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys” went on view this year.)

Johnson, who is a major collector and continues to serve on the boards of Performa and Ballroom Marfa, was originally recruited to the Guggenheim’s board by the former director Richard Armstrong. Johnson served on the Art and Museum Committee and was particularly invested in the expansion of the internship program. He said that the Guggenheim played “a special role in my arts education” and that he hoped his contribution there had been substantive.

The survey is organized by Naomi Beckwith, Guggenheim’s deputy director and chief curator, and Andrea Karnes, chief curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. It will travel to the Fort Worth museum after the Guggenheim.

Beckwith and Johnson are longtime friends who were raised and educated in Chicago. “We called ourselves long-lost cousins because there was a real familiarity in the root sense,” Beckwith said.

She was already in conversation with the artist about a possible project in her former role as curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which originated Johnson’s first traveling museum show in 2012. Pointing to the Guggenheim’s history of working with artists inspired by and contending with Wright’s building in daring ways, including Tino Sehgal and Matthew Barney, Beckwith said she was excited “for the museum to return to form and invite an artist who had the ambition of really working with the architecture.”

Johnson’s first prominent public debut, shortly after graduating from Columbia College in Chicago, was in Thelma Golden’s “Freestyle” exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001, an opening salvo for a younger generation of Black artists asking for a more nuanced look at their work through the frame of art history as well as race. (Johnson went on to get his Master of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.)

For the upcoming survey, Beckwith said, “we wanted to think about an exhibition that allowed Rashid to kind of walk through these social histories that have unfolded over the last couple decades” — the elevation of Black voices in the art world and beyond — “but also allowed a kind of grace for him to be a feeling and thinking human being.”

The show takes its title from a poem by writer and activist Amiri Baraka, a recurring reference in Johnson’s work. A new film by Johnson titled “Sanguine,” which will premiere in a solo show at Hauser & Wirth in Paris beginning Oct. 14, explores intergenerational relationships among the artist’s father, himself and his son, and includes excerpts from “A Poem for Deep Thinkers” spoken by Baraka.

At the Guggenheim, “Sanguine” will be displayed inside a new site-specific installation of the same name. Modular black steel scaffolding will rise floor to ceiling on facing sides of the Guggenheim’s top ramp and contain potted plants, grow lights, sculpted shea butter busts, books, ceramics and alcoves for the film, for painting and for a working piano. It will serve as an improvisational performance space for a wide range of invited artists, as will a second site-specific stage installation that Johnson is planning for the rotunda floor.

“Living plants housed in gridded armatures help facilitate a conversation around empathy and issues of care and how they help navigate certain kinds of architectural spaces,” Johnson said. He will suspend a flurry of palm trees and other plants on wires anchored to both sides of “Sanguine” that will descend into the space of the oculus like a heavenly garden cascading toward Earth.

“It’s such an enormous kind of volume,” he added. “To leave it unmolested wasn’t an option for me. It needed to be interrupted by some intervention.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.