Cheryl Johnson-Odim & Rashid Johnson: Heart-Turned-Inside-Out Poems (PB) (2024)

A beautiful artist's book documenting a mother and son's intimate exchange across time and mediums

This tenderly wrought artist's book is a collaboration between American conceptual artist Rashid Johnson (born 1977) and his mother, historian Cheryl Johnson-Odim (born 1948). Bound as a single signature with silver-foiled text on the cover and multiple carefully selected papers, the book is based on an updated version of Johnson-Odim's poetry pamphlet Other Women Before Me, first published in 1985, the year her son Rashid turned eight years old. In 2022, Johnson presented the publication--along with titles by the likes of Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Claudia Rankine and Sylvia Plath--in a reading area within his exhibition Sodade at Hauser & Wirth Menorca, where the image on the cover of this publication was also on view.
Johnson's drawings are sourced from a 2020 sketchbook and bookend the poems, while the central pages of the book contain a personal and far-ranging conversation between mother and son. In a delightful touch, Johnson's cover artwork folds out, transforming into a standalone poster.