Rashaad Newsome: Build or Destroy, January 15–February 26, 2022 Minnesota Street Project Foundation-Gallery 106
Rashaad Newsome: Build or Destroy
Opening Artist Reception | January 15, 2022, | 4-6 pm
Minnesota Street Project Foundation (MSP Foundation) is pleased to announce the public debut of Build or Destroy, by multimedia artist Rashaad Newsome. Build or Destroy is the fourth exhibition by the inaugural grantees of MSP Foundation’s California Black Voices Project, which launched in 2020. For more info click HERE!
ASSEMBLY February 17–March 6, 2022 at the Park Avenue Armory
Assembly is a new, site-specific commission by interdisciplinary artist Rashaad Newsome that features the artist’s Artificial Intelligence-powered creation, Being, as both the centerpiece of an exhibition spanning the many facets of Newsome’s practice and the teacher of daily interactive workshops. In tandem, Newsome will premiere a new performance featuring live poetry, music, vocalists, and dancers from across the globe—presenting contemporary movements that synthesize vogue with the traditional dance from the performers’ territories. For more info and to buy tickets click HERE!
SF Dance Film Festival sat down with Rashaad Newsome to talk about the ideas behind his dynamic performance film Black Magic.
Rashaad Newsome is a world-renowned multidisciplinary artist whose work blends multiple practices—including collage, sculpture, film, music, technology, and performance and crafts compositions that speak of and to Black and Queer culture. His latest filmic work, Black Magic documents a 2019 live performance that explores trans women and their contributions to the vogue fem lexicon and expands and activates it with the use of motion tracking software and visual effects. Clare Schweitzer spoke with Rashaad about the multi-layered journey of the current version of the work, which will screen in the Dancing Queens Program at the San Francisco Dance Film Festival. To listen visit the link below.
Dancing Through the Lens.
Rashaad Newsome’s Black Magic included in the 2021 San Francisco Dance Film Festival
DANCING QUEENS
A dancing celebration of the LGBTQ+ community.
Celebrate queerness in all of its forms through these six shorts. The films in this screening valiantly move from the intimacy of partners’ embraces to the emphatic maximalism of Vogue Fem performance and recognize the challenges of existing beyond the binary but ultimately embrace difference as a force for pride and positive change. For more info, click HERE!
King of Arms on view as part of The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, investigates the aesthetic impulses of early 20th-century Black culture that have proved ubiquitous to the southern region of the United States. The exhibition chronicles the pervasive sonic and visual parallels that have served to shape the contemporary landscape and looks deeply into the frameworks of landscape, religion, and the Black body—deep meditative repositories of thought and expression. Within the visual expression, assemblage, collage, appropriation, and sonic transference are explored as deeply connected to music tradition. The visual expression of the African American South along with the Black sonic culture are overlooked tributaries to the development of art in the United States and serve as interlocutors of American modernism. This exhibition looks to the contributions of artists, academically trained as well as those who were relegated to the margins as “outsiders,” to uncover the foundational aesthetics that gave rise to the shaping of our contemporary expression. For more info click HERE!
World Premiere of Rashaad Newsome’s Build or Destroy (2021), commissioned for the San José Museum of Art’s 2021 Gala + Auction broadcast.
In his new work, Build or Destroy (2021), a video and NFT commissioned by the San José Museum of Art, Newsome brings to life the female composition in 1st Place. Animating the bedazzled and blazing body, the artist explores ideas around identity construction—particularly Black trans femme identity—and how performance might offer space for its creation and detonation. Build or Destroy premieres at the San José Museum of Art’s 2021 Gala + Auction broadcast. For more info click HERE
The Oakland Museum of California presents Mothership: Voyage Into Afrofuturism, August 7, 2021–February 27, 2022.
Mothership is an original exhibition organized by OMCA Curator Rhonda Pagnozzi and Consulting Curator Essence Harden in partnership with over 50 Black artists, historians, musicians, and collaborators whose work examines Afrofuturism and Black culture. This exhibition is a continuation of OMCA’s commitment to elevating stories and ideas that inspire a more expansive future.
The multidisciplinary exhibition will bring together art, music, literature, film, and more to express a present and future where Black voices are centered. Friends and family will be able to observe central figures of this cultural phenomena, including works from author Octavia E. Butler, avant-garde jazz musician Sun Ra, filmmaker Kahlil Joseph’s fugitive newscast BLKNWS®, interdisciplinary artist Rashaad Newsome, Black Twitter, and more. Visitors will also have a chance to see an original Dora Milaje costume from the film Black Panther, a replica of the Mothership itself—musical ensemble Parliament Funkadelic’s Afrofuturistic vessel, and explore an immersive audio experience curated by DJ Spooky.