RASHAAD NEWSOME
Born 1979, New Orleans, LA
Lives and works in New York, NY
2001 BFA, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA
Selected honors: Rush Arts Gold Award (2017), Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (2011)
Selected museum exhibitions and performances: The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; MoMA PS1, New York, New Orleans Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Selected public collections: Brooklyn Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Rashaad Newsome is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is deeply invested in how images used in media and popular culture communicate distorted notions of power. As Newsome has explained, “using images from popular culture that produce and perpetuate systems of oppression, I explore how race, capitalism and gender are employed to facilitate those systems… My use of material from popular culture is a subversive way of helping the viewers to understand the politics of difference.”
It is difficult to precisely say what Newsome’s primary medium is at any moment – mediums that stretch from complex video and computer production to vogue choreography and performance to often heraldic and elaborate collage – as he moves from one to another and sometimes brings them together. Using the equalizing force of sampling, Newsome crafts compositions that surprise in their associative potential and walk the tightrope between intersectionality, social practice and abstraction and minimalism.
For his exuberant, meticulously composed collages, Newsome culls images from hip-hop and luxury magazines. In an interview with Laila Pedro, The Brooklyn Rail, from July 11, 2016, Newsome spoke about how he used his expertise in digital production to enhance his work in collage: “When I started my collage works they were more flat. As a way to push the material further, I started to scan the images and bring them into postproduction software and animate them. This allowed me to create the illusion of depth in a way that had been more difficult previously. I then brought what I did in post-production back to the analog process, putting everything on different planes and making the images much more three-dimensional.”