RASHAADNEWSOME

DIGITAL BODIES

October 31 -December 3rd ‘ICON’ will be on view at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, as part of theDigital Bodies exhibition program. Digital Bodies is a one-year program that features videos by artists who use and manipulate digital technologies—mainly computer-generated images, signs, and systems sourced from digital platforms—to reflect on how these technologies have impacted our everyday lives and changed the ways we relate to the world. Given our current state of constant digital expansion and acceleration, these works express the pervasiveness and indispensability of digital culture in shaping our daily interactions.

Tuesday, November 7 at 7:00pm and 9:00pm Rashaad Newsome will present his newest performance work at Park Avenue Armory titled RUNNING, an immersive performance evoking an abstract portrait of soul created through light and voice. RUNNING is centered on the musicology term for a singer’s improvised embellishment; a “vocal run” is a rapid series of ascending or descending musical notes sung in quick succession. Running is a vocal effect that spans a variety of musical genres from the 19th century to today. Newsome’s dynamic performance features three local New York City vocalists performing an original score composed by the artist, inspired by samples of vocal runs by Aretha Franklin, Patti LaBelle, Whitney Houston, Marvin Gaye, B.B. King, James Brown, and Kelly Price, among others. Click on the link below to buy tickets.

RUNNING

Rashaad Newsome – Reclaiming Our Time

LOOKING BACK / LOOKING FORWARD

Alok Vaid-Menon

In order to reclaim something, it must have been stolen. Call it cubism (not tribal art). Call it gender (not Black). Call it museum (not Ghana). Call it new (not ancient). They say that the first people annihilated upon colonial contact were gender non-conforming. I wonder, if given the time, they would have been able to convince us that they were not, in fact, men wearing dresses. That neither them nor the garments they adorned, nor the statues they adored were gendered. What does it mean to be a not? To be defined by absence? The most sophisticated critique is one which unsettles the very foundation of the question to begin with. Are you a man or a woman? No. From the cover of Vogue, to the New Museum, the rat race ‘beyond the binary’ has commenced and everyone is haphazardly scampering toward it. Everyone that is, except Rashaad Newsome. He is sitting on a stool in his new exhibition RECLAIMING OUR TIME shaking his head, maybe even amused. When you throw a word like “race,” or “woman,” or even “African,” or “American,” on one of Newsome’s creations, it just doesn’t stick. Like an undercooked piece of spaghetti on a fridge it droops and eventually falls into its own insignificance. In a moment defined by reactionary politics, righteous moral indignation on all sides, and the desire for absolute answers and truths, Newsome invites us to stay a while, take a seat, dig deeper. How do you depict an image that does not exist? I mean, no longer exists? I mean, was stolen? I mean, could exist here right now if we wanted it to? You look at history to remember a future. Building off his celebrated exhibition STOP PLAYING MY FACE, Newsome remembers a future. He pairs nontraditional weaves from African American beauty shows with traditional Africa statues, his old work with his new work, luxury with idolatry, novelty with antiquity, and – for a moment – when gazing upon his subjects gazing upon themselves, there is a sense of resolution, therapy even. Perhaps the cohesion we seek comes from developing a different relationship with the complexity we fear. In Newsome’s work there are no rules: oppositionality becomes compatibility, an ocean is swallowed and spat back out (simultaneously), the clock stops, rewinds, and fast-forwards at the same time. This is what happens when queerness begins with race, and not the other way around. Newsome has a tendency toward the impossible: he takes subjects disappeared from time and history and exalts them – fighting for abundance where others see absence and insisting on a futurity in that which has been deposed. And in that move he teaches us that what we are looking for is already here. Has always been.

http://www.mmoca.org/exhibitions/exhibits/rashaad-newsome-icon

On view in the museum’s Imprint Gallery, this exhibition focuses solely on the video-based component of the artist’s larger practice, and highlights works that showcase his engagement with the dance phenomenon of voguing. Although voguing emerged from Harlem’s queer ballroom scene during the 1960s and 70s, the dance style entered the cultural mainstream in 1990 with Madonna’s iconic music video “Vogue,” now remembered as a notorious instance of cultural appropriation. Newsome, however, celebrates the true origins of voguing, thereby reclaiming a vital cultural history by giving it back to the queer Black and Latino community from which it arose.

The exhibition includes Untitled (2008) and Untitled—New Way (2009), two of Newsome’s earlier works that document contemporary vogue culture: the artist filmed dancers’ vogue improvisations, edited the footage to isolate certain dance elements, and asked the dancers re-perform their movements based on his video-edited choreography. Also on view are two of the artist’s more recent video works, ICON (2014) and Stop Playing in My Face (2016), both of which weave together the exuberant pageantry of voguing with digitally-rendered backdrops of glittering architectural spaces. At a moment when individuals of all races are questioning sex and gender-based binaries, Newsome’s videos offer a timely examination of cultural power and agency within the context of gender, sexuality, and race.

https://www.mcnayart.org/exhibitions/upcoming/rashaad-newsome-knot

Combining baroque grandeur, hip-hop swagger, and black and LGBTQ subcultures, Rashaad Newsome creates evocative works of art that highlights fantasy, capitalistic obsessions, and systemic oppressions. The opulence of fashion magazines and society culture is subverted through the vocabulary of voguing, the New York ballroom scene, and New Orleans bounce music. Newsome applies a keen awareness of art historical and alternative cultural sources to offer pointed commentaries on contemporary culture and identity politics. On the McNay’s AT&T Lobby wall, the artist presents the video KNOT, 2014, floating over an entire wall wrapped in his striking Jungle Gardenia print.

The Conductor combines clips culled from rap music videos with selections from composer Carl Orff’s classical masterpiece “Carmina Burana,” a piece of music that has itself been widely sampled in pop culture. The music video footage has been edited to isolate and remix shots of the rap artists’ hand gestures so they appear to be conducting Orff’s orchestra, a juxtaposition that allows Newsome to playfully break down boundaries between seemingly opposed cultural forms. As part of the presentation of this work, June 2nd and 3rd Newsome has invited New York Hip Hop Mc. Controverse to write and perform new material inspired by the installation.

http://mocajacksonville.unf.edu/Exhibitions/Featured/Synthesize-Art-and-Music/

On Sunday, April 2nd Rashaad Newsome received the Artist & Edition Award at the Baltimore Contemporary Print Fair held at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Established in 2002, the Artist & Edition Award recognizes the work of a leading artist or master printer who has made a substantial contribution to the imagery, themes, and techniques of printmaking today.