[1] Rhoden graduated from Birmingham's Industrial High School, and then enrolled at Talladega College on an art scholarship.

[2] Rhoden worked in wood and bronze, and created a number of commissioned works including Untitled (Family) at Harlem Hospital Center;[3] Mitochondria at Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan; Curved Wal at the African American Museum in Philadelphia; Zodiacal Structure at the Sheraton Hotel in Philadelphia; and a sculpture of Frederick Douglass at Lincoln University.

[1] Rhoden served in World War II, studied at the School of Painting and Sculpture at Columbia University, and was named a Fulbright Fellow in 1951.

In 1956, he was a member of an artists delegation that visited the Soviet Union, Poland and Yugoslavia under a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

Shortly thereafter, John Rhoden left for Indonesia on a Rockefeller Foundation Grant to set up a bronze foundry at the Institut Teknologi in Bandung from 1961 through 1963.