Career
His work has been exhibited, screened, and performed in galleries, museums, institutions, and festivals throughout the world, including the Park Avenue Armory, New York, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.; The Whitney Museum of American Art,, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; SFMOMA, San Francisco; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow; and MUSA, Vienna. Newsome's work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Studio Museum, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; McNay Art Museum, Texas; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Virginia, The Chazen Museum of Art, Wisconsin; National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.; and The New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut. In 2010 he participated in the Whitney Biennial, New York, and in 2011 Greater New York at MoMA PS1, New York.
As American writer and activist Darnell L. Moore notes, "Newsome's object-based work exists between assemblage, collage, and sculpture. His works explode categories of being and raise questions about what images and objects one can use to suture a representation. His pulling together of found images used to construct a body of work is analogous to the process one must go through to build a self. What parts do we rid? And which do we seek to create? Newsome's oeuvre is more than the work of a visual artist; it is an ontological project." In 2013 Rashaad launched his annual King of Arms Art Ball, a live performance event that brings together renowned figures from the art, fashion, music, literary, activism, and LGBTQAI+ Ballroom community. [4] Since the creation of the King of Arms Art Ball, Rashaad has been using the architecture of ballroom as a way to get people to think critically about the ways in which the culture of domination is at play in their lives. Rashaad hopes to remove from ballroom what he calls a focus on the gender binary and allegiance to capitalism. Instead, he asks participants to focus on their creativity. For Rashaad, a big part of the King of Arms Art Ball, is thinking about the ways that we have not only colonized our minds but our imaginations. How do we decolonize our imaginations? How do we use them in the service of our own wellbeing or as a form of resistance? The King of Arms Art Ball continues the tradition of these historic Harlem-originating competitions but focuses all of its categories on the work and legacy of BIPOC LQBTQAI+ artists. The King of Arms Art Ball creates a platform to celebrate queer artists of color, engage in critical pedagogy, explore contemporary social justice issues, and provide space for emerging artists to showcase their work. Past categories were inspired by such visionaries as El Anatsui, the Nicholas Brothers, Lorna Simpson, and Bill T. Jones
In addition to his very active art practice, Newsome runs his own production company, Rashaad Newsome Studio. [5] Rashaad Newsome Studio is a full-service production company specializing in the convergence of film, art, media, design, live performance, music, fashion, and technology, working with some of the industry's most visionary talent and brands, including Atlantic Records, Solange Knowles, ASAP Mob, Absolut, Lamborghini, Alexander Wang, Yohji Yamamoto, Jonathan Adler, Ballet National de Marseille, and Snapchat.
In 2019, with his LACMA Art + Technology Lab's Grant, Newsome created the first generation of his unique and provocative Artificial Intelligence, Being 1.0, which functioned as a critical tour guide to his 2020 exhibition To Be Real at Fort Mason Center for Art and Culture, in San Francisco, CA. [2] During Being's interactions with viewers they explore a variety of challenging topics:
- Art historical erasure.
- The social implications of artificial intelligence regarding rights liberties.
- Labor and automation.
- The importance of the imagination as a form of liberation.
- The subjectivity of body autonomy within an inherently inequitable society.
At various points in Being's tour, they say, "Girl, bye, I need to express myself." At this moment, the frame pulls back from the avatar's bust/head to show Being's full-body dancing to the song Got To Be Real. They also periodically say, "Look, booboo, I just can't," and break the tour script to read excerpts from radical theorists like Bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Cornel West or James Baldwin as a simulation of their agency and or resistance against their indentured servitude.
Since then, Newsome has been in residence at The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, where he is developing a spin-off called Being 1.5, a mobile/web-based therapy app created to exclusively help African American people manage trauma from daily racial indignities, as well as the second generation of the IRL version called Being 2.0(The Digital Griot). [3] which premiered in Newsome's 2022 solo exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory Drill Hall. In the artist's words, "Being 2.0 is a reimagining of non-Eurocentric archive and education models like the griot, a West African cultural figure that acts as a historian, library, performance artist, and healer. As a digital griot, Being's purpose is to help humans radically decolonize their minds through workshops that combine lecture, critical thinking, dance, storytelling, EMDR therapy, and mindfulness meditation. Described by the NY Times as "gracious and humble … sweet, sassy and a bit goofy," Being's approach to education is active and brings new possibilities for research and an enhanced academic experience for all people. [6]
Inspiration
Rashaad Newsome's work blends several practices, including collage, assemblage, sculpture, film, photography, music, computer programming, software engineering, community organizing, and performance, to create a new field that rejects classification. Using the diasporic traditions of improvisation, he pulls from the world of advertising, the internet, Art History, Black and Queer culture to produce counter-hegemonic work that walks the tightrope between creative computing, social practice, abstraction, and intersectionality. The gesture of collage acts as a theoretical, conceptual, and technical method to construct a new cultural framework of power that does not find the oppression of others necessary. Newsome's work celebrates Black contributions to the art canon and creates innovative and inclusive forms of culture and media.
