Rashid Johnson is a Conceptual artist whose work investigates racial identity in the context of post-black art. Johnson’s Untitled, Large Anxious Red belongs to a series of drawings and prints that consider the deeply personal, yet inherently collective experiences of Black men in America. The vulnerable subject that dominates the work confronts the viewer with the visceral nature of its representation, a cathartic response to a time characterized by mass incarceration and endless police violence. Repeated in a grid across the composition and executed in a deep red, Johnson's "anxious men" emphasize the structural violence of racism. The present work comes from a small edition of 51.

Born in 1977 in Chicago, Rashid Johnson grew up in an African American family which influenced many of his ideas about identity. After earning a BFA from Columbia College Chicago in 2000, he went on to receive an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Johnson first rose to prominence at the age of 21, when he was the youngest artist showcased in the seminal group exhibition Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001. He has since been the subject of solo exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth in New York and the Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis. The artist’s works can be found among the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. The artist currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.