Westfield and Art Production Fund are pleased to announce the second installment of their ongoing public video art program. Starting April 25, 2018, renowned artist Rashaad Newsome’s ‘ICON’ will be displayed across all of the large-scale screens at Westfield World Trade Center NYC and Westfield Century City LA until May 2018. The video works will appear on both center’s state-of-the-art digital media networks, including Westfield World Trades 19 screens of varying size, with one measuring 4 stories tall and another 280 feet long and Century City’s two 100-foot large-format and high impact digital media screens. ‘ICON’ is an amalgamation of several ideas I’ve been working with over the past decade: the design formula of heraldry, ornament, architecture, vogue fem performance, hip hop culture and the resilience of black queer folk,” said the artist. “In some ways, they are a live action departure from my collage work.”

“The architecture of this period also has many connections to the body, I was thinking a lot about the ribbed vaults and Vitruvian principle found in a lot of these spaces,” explained Newsome. “In the video the dome is activated by queer black bodies performing as a metaphor, for the queering of these seemingly disparate elements. It is queer, not because queer, trans, and gender nonconforming people are visibly leading many contingents of the resistance against dehumanization, but because both the movement and the runway are populated by people who seek to queer, or destabilize the status quo and redistribute material forms of power.”