Johnson became known in the early 2000s for works that blend references to the history of art, Black culture, and his own experience growing up in Chicago. His work integrates a wide range of media including photography, video, sculpture, painting, drawing, and installation. In 2015, for an exhibition at the Drawing Center, he began the Anxious Men series, crude, anonymous figures incised in black soap and wax on a background of white tiles in a gestural style indebted to street art, graffiti, and Jean Dubuffet's art brut. During the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, the series evolved into grids of faces drawn in red oil stick as an expression of heightened global and personal anxiety. This triptych, which Johnson created for the Morgan, belongs to this series.