The Adam Baidawi era of GQ has begun with a bang. On Tuesday, the magazine unveiled the cover for its new special global issue featuring an extensive interview with Jay-Z—who is now styling his name JAŸ-Z in honor of the 30th anniversary of his 1996 debut album Reasonable Doubt.
For the cover, GQ tapped contemporary art star Rashid Johnson, who has interrogated the Black male psyche in paintings, installations, and photographs, while also resisting the notion that Blackness is monolithic or easily defined.
In that respect, Johnson is an apt match for the rapper and hip-hop mogul, who has spent his career behind the mic, in front of the camera, and in the boardroom challenging facile notions of Blackness and its place in American culture and life.
Rashid Johnson/GQ
Jay-Z has also, over the last decade or so, increasingly engaged the contemporary art world, most memorably with the music video for the 2013 song “Picasso Baby,” which featured the artist performing at Pace Gallery in a manner recalling Marina Abramović’s 2010 installation The Artist Is Present. In 2018, Jay-Z released a collaborative album with his wife Beyoncé, Everything is Love, led by the single “Apeshit.” The music video for that song featured the artists at the Louvre, along with shots of numerous masterpieces in the museum’s collection.
In 2023, Roc Nation, Jay-Z’s entertainment company, partnered with the Brooklyn Public Library on “The Book of Hov,” an exhibition chronicling his career, and featuring work by contemporary artists, including a sculpture by Daniel Arsham, Hov’s Hands (2023), a cast of Jay-Z’s arms and hands making a diamond triangle hand sign. Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, Jay-Z’s art dealer, assisted with the curation. He has featured on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list in recent years; he owns several works by Johnson.
Johnson, meanwhile, is arguably one of the highest profile artists working today. Last April, he opened a celebrated survey at the Guggenheim Museum in New York; the show has since traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas.
For the shoot with Jay-Z, Johnson told GQ that he referenced work by Harlem Renaissance photographer James Van Der Zee, as well as the work of painter Francis Bacon, who is known for his raw, unsettling portraits.
“Jay’s music, lyricism, and sophistication are very much in line with a lot of interesting and historically important Black thinkers,” Johnson told GQ, linking Jay-Z to Harold Cruse, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Michael Eric Dyson.
Rashid Johnson/GQ
