Rashaad Newsome × LACMA × Snapchat: Monumental Perspectives (Collection III)

Monumental Perspectives brings together artists and technologists to create augmented reality monuments that explore just some of the histories of Los Angeles communities in an effort to highlight perspectives from across the region. In consultation with community leaders and historians, the third and final cohort of artists use the lens of collective ancestral memory to examine the individual and communal legacies we leave today.

Self Inventions

Self Inventions pays homage to the spirit of perpetual regeneration and innovation in Black culture. Rashaad Newsome’s shape-shifting robotic figure reflects the resilience of Black people in the face of ongoing struggle. The optical effect of transformation from one form to another employs fractal geometry, an aesthetic that, along with the designs of the robotic figures themselves, is inspired by African art and its early use of abstraction. Often used as a term in computer science, abstraction here not only serves as a visual tool but illustrates a tactic in Black culture’s perpetual state of transformation.

Newsome draws comparisons between the labor performed by robots and the unpaid, compulsory service Black people have had to perform historically. In the face of untenable circumstances, Black culture has not only survived and adapted, but has found a way to flourish. This is the exciting yet vexing task of creating Blackness, a process that many of the residents in the Exposition Park area have long been engaged in. The figures in Self Invention are the “engineers of themselves,” paying homage to the legacy of Black resistance, carrying forward a history of endless innovation.

Self Inventions may be experienced at Exposition Park’s Rose Garden beginning this fall or from anywhere on Snapchat by searching in Lens Explorer or scanning the QR code below.

newsome
Composition and voice by Rashaad Newsome and music by Miles Jamison
Snapchat Lens support: Michael French
Self Inventions/Endless Innovation by Rashaad Newsome

Rashaad Newsome features in Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage at The Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Tennessee, USA, Sep 15–Dec 31, 2023

The first major museum exhibition devoted to the subject, Multiplicity presents over 80 major collage and collage-informed works that reflect the breadth and complexity of Black identity. Featuring an intergenerational group of 52 living artists, Multiplicity explores the varying ways collage is employed and how the technique suggests diverse conceptual concerns such as cultural hybridity, notions of beauty, gender fluidity, and historical memory. By assembling pieces of paper, photographs, fabric, and salvaged or repurposed materials, these artists create unified compositions that express the endless possibilities of Black-constructed narratives despite our fragmented society.

Click here for more info!

In Conversation: Rashaad Newsome and Tamar Clarke-Brown

Newsome and Clarke-Brown discuss the artist’s new animated video work, Hands Performance, commissioned by Somerset House. Together, they reflect on how the film platforms the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community while considering the limits of language and how AI informs his practice.

Watch here!