Community Bandstand

For Community Bandstand, Rashid Johnson transforms his father’s old citizens band (or CB) radios into a sculptural object that functions as a shelving unit by placing two radiotelephones side-by-side in a cupboard and mounting a diamond-shaped antenna on top of it. A black cube, reminiscent of a mystical pendulum, is filled with shea butter and placed at the center of the gridded structure. In his artistic narratives, the artist often embeds everyday objects that recall his own childhood and/or a collective African American cultural identity and intellectual history. The employment of these materials is always conceived within this dichotomy: while they come from a place of personal ownership, they also reflect a larger cultural discourse.

In Community Bandstand the artist experiments with a medium that has become all but obsolete—the CB radio, a short-distance radio communication system between private individuals predominantly used in the United States between the 1940s and ’70s. The work is Johnson’s personal cosmology, through which he revives the childhood memory of his father calling out into the world with his CB radios. Ultimately, the sculpture allows a more universal reading. Community Bandstand represents an attempt to reach out into the unknown, in which the anonymity of the radiotelephone turns race and class into non-signifiers.