Photography by WHITNEY LEGGE courtesy of RASHAAD NEWSOME STUDIO
Being (the Digital Griot),artificial intelligence, 2019-current
Image courtesy of RASHAAD NEWSOME STUDIO
Rashaad Newsome is a boundary-breaking artist whose multidisciplinary practice defies categorisation. With a background spanning collage, sculpture, film and community organising, Newsome’s work challenges conventional narratives and explores the complexities of identity and technology. His global exhibitions and numerous awards attest to the profound impact of their art, which serves as a catalyst for social change and empowerment.
hube: Exploring themes of identity and cultural representation seems to be a recurring motif in your work. Could you share some key influences that have shaped your artistic journey in addressing these themes?
Rashaad Newsome: We all have our identities, such as race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, that coexist within us and influence the way we see and are seen by society. For example, as a Black, working class, gender non-conforming, Queer person, my experiences and the way I interact with the world are heavily influenced by all these identities. I cannot separate them or see social issues exclusively through one lens. The intersectionality of my lived experience is always with me. As art reflects life, it’s natural that it would be a part of the various conversations I’m having in my work.
A critical influence for me in understanding myself and how to talk about my work has been feminist scholar bell hooks. She often debated the direct link between representations in pop culture and how we live our lives: the over-sexualised woman that obeys the male fantasy, the Black male always being seen as the villain, the Queer man always being seen as weak, or the poor often deemed unfit for history. My work is a consistent effort to break free or reframe these types of structures that are persistently placed on us.
h: The ‘Shade Compositions’ series is a striking blend of performance, music, and digital art. What inspired the inception of this series, and what messages do you intend to convey to your audience through it?
RN: The work really came from a series of conversations I was having around 2004 regarding Black American vernacular, facial expressions, body language, gestures, and paralinguistics. I was thinking about how complex this shared collective communication method was but also how it was often framed as something ghetto or used by a person with a ‘low class’. Although this criticism was happening inside the Black community as well, the source engendering that self-critique came from white respectability politics. Could this language offer me something as an artist that might expand my practice and the performance art canon? Could it be an inspired attempt to reclaim those things that the world might teach you are lowly?
While developing the piece, I was also studying creative coding, which led me to build a custom video and audio recording and manipulation tool using video game hardware. The experience of creating that tool led me to explore the deep rabbit hole of Black folks and tech, and I’ve been on that train ever since.
h: Collaboration appears to be integral to your practice, spanning across various disciplines and involving diverse collaborators. How does this collaborative approach inform your creative process, and what do you find most fulfilling about it?
RN: I often say that my work employs the diasporic traditions of improvisation and collage. When Black people came to America, we were divorced from our original culture and identity and, out of necessity, had to create our identity and, subsequently, our culture in real time. An endeavour such as this involves great improvisation to navigate an anti-Black world as it struggles to resolve that issue. Various existing cultures must be collaged together to create a new one. In many ways, African Americans are the most beautiful and complex product of the American experiment.
The impulse to mix and improvise is intrinsic to my experience and informs the confident choices I make in my work, which lead to synthesising seemingly disparate disciplines. Working that way also keeps me in a state of discovery, learning a new tool, a new program, a new person, and how to push them to and beyond their limits to create something compelling that we can all be proud of at the end. It’s quite thrilling, actually.
Perhaps being a child of the birthplace of jazz also has something to do with it. Collaboration and collage are the lingua franca of jazz.
h: Your involvement in Constellations includes presenting ‘Self Inventions’ as part of the LACMA × Snapchat initiative. Could you elaborate on the intersection of augmented reality and collective ancestral memory within this project, and what impact do you hope it will have on viewers?
RN: The idea that you can remake the world at your whim is fascinating and inspiring. I had so much fun creating that piece, and it opened my mind to so many other ways the medium can be used. The prompt from LACMA × Snapchat was to create a monument, but the idea of a monument with this digital ephemeral quality is very anti-monument, which I was fascinated by.
As a way to further explore this reimagining of the monument, which historically immortalises a person or important event, I made it a monument to the Black & Black Queer community. This led me to think about the legacy of these communities: a legacy of endless innovation, particularly as it relates to creating the self when the self doesn’t exist in space or the world. The poem I wrote for it says, ‘Nameless, aimlessly, we move through spaces. Adapt to spaces. Create space where there are no spaces. This is our safe space or perhaps a space with a healthy sense of risk. The first time I came to this place, I had a time! Past, present, and future. Block universe. African fractals transforming my form’.
The monument’s ‘figure’ is a cohort of figures that speak to the importance of community in liberation struggles. They combine various early to mid-century West African masks used in time travel rituals with cyborg body parts. This was a way to speak to how, within the Black American experience, we often wrestle with gaining knowledge of the past, surviving the present, and imagining a future simultaneously.
Image courtesy of RASHAAD NEWSOME STUDIO
Afro-fabulations 3, 2024
Image courtesy of RASHAAD NEWSOME STUDIO
h: As an artist engaging with social and political issues, what role do you believe art plays in shaping societal conversations and instigating change, particularly in contexts related to race, gender, and identity?
RN: Art has the immense power to inspire, which is why, historically, it is the first thing dictators seek to oppress or erase. We can see this now with the book banning in Texas and Florida. Artistic inspiration can activate individuals and communities and, in turn, create change.
h: With an exhibition history spanning various venues globally, how do the unique contexts of exhibition spaces influence the reception and interpretation of your work?
RN: It changes from place to place because spaces are loaded in different ways. Showing objects is a very different experience from showing live art. Currently, I have an exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts as part of their What is Truth? season, a series of interlinked exhibitions investigating how we can know what is true in the world around us. For me and their curatorial team, this started with trying to define truth. In the words of Theodor Adorno, ‘the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak,’ which gives it an existential emphasis, so we can see truth as a way of life, not a set of propositions that correspond to a set of things in the world. While I connect with this idea, I also relate with Foucault and Nietzsche’s ideas that, historically, truth is often embedded within a given power structure. Therefore, it shifts through various epistemologies throughout history.
The works on view at Sainsbury engage in a formation of attention that sits between these two ideas of truth. They have a wonderful collection of African art and objects. However, the presence of these objects and how they got there is quite fraught. As a way to engage with ‘truth’ I worked closely with the curators to show works from the collection in conversation with a series of collages I created in London last summer, which incorporate African objects like those in the collection with the Black body and jewellery. The jewellery references are a way to imbue them with a dazzling quality. The root word daze, meaning ‘to be stunned’ or ‘to stun or overpower with strong or excessive light’, dates back to the late 14th century. Formally, it was a way to play with light within the construction of the image, but this work connotes the ways Black folks have had to be dazzling in the eyes of our oppressors as a survival strategy. In these images, the jewellery is akin to armour, a physical and emotional protective barrier required to navigate systemic racial violence.
They have also commissioned a piece where I will bring the works from the collection to life. I am working with my AI, Being, to give them a voice to speak about their abduction and use creativity and compassion to transform their suffering into forms and deeds that empower and inspire.
h: Your artistic practice encompasses a wide array of disciplines, from collage to community organising. How do you navigate the intersections of these diverse practices in your creative process?
RN: I’ve been working that way for so long they don’t seem so different to me. The same process of building power through collective action in community organising is also present when I’m creating a picture; it’s about how you make something that can be impactful and make people feel something. Many of the collages at the Sainsbury Centre have my hallmark bright red lips and gold teeth as a way to play with gender presentation. This gives a shout-out to the aesthetics of the early feminist movement and hip-hop but also imbues the pictures with a sense of joy. All the mouths are computer-generated replicas of the mouths of children in a state of happiness. There is something quite pure about a child’s smile, and this was a way to code that feeling of innocence into the picture.
h: Your contribution to ‘Constellations’ involves exploring representation and history through monuments, reflecting on the resilience of Black communities. What challenges or opportunities did you encounter in translating this exploration into an augmented reality experience?
RN: Working with Snap AR Lens Studio was challenging because I wasn’t able to show the total capacity of my animation skills due to the limits of how much data the app could render in real-time. Still, it was a fun exercise in minimalism.
h: Your accolades and awards span a wide range, reflecting the diversity of your practice. How do these recognitions impact your artistic trajectory and shape your future aspirations?
RN: It is always great to have your work affirmed by your colleagues and community. It also helps me build relationships and start conversations across various disciplines that might not otherwise be in dialogue with each other.
h: ‘Constellations’ seeks to challenge the notion of the Anthropocene Epoch, repositioning humans within a broader ecological framework. How does your work within this exhibition engage with this theme, particularly in relation to issues of representation, memory, and agency within larger environments?
RN: In an era where most people view AI with confusion and fear, I think showing a work like REALNESS 3, a portrait of Being (the Digital Griot), an artificial intelligence, supports Donna Haraway’s idea that human activity is not the dominant influence on Earth. By looking not only at humans but at the tools we create, we can see the motivation behind the invention of those tools and how those tools mirror who we are. It is the bothness of it all for me. AI is being used to model and predict the impacts of climate change, develop more sustainable practices in agriculture and energy production, and optimise resource management to reduce environmental impact. On the other hand, the development and deployment of AI technologies can have a large ecological footprint, including energy consumption, e-waste from discarded devices, and the use of rare earth metals in hardware components.
Ironically, just like humans, proper stewardship and ethical considerations are essential to ensure that AI contributes positively to the environment. I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Installation view, 2024
Photography courtesy of SAINSBURY CENTRE FOR VISUAL ARTS
Photography by WHITNEY LEGGE courtesy of RASHAAD NEWSOME STUDIO
Self Inventions (augmented reality monument), 2023
Image courtesy of LACMA ART + TECHNOLOGY LAB
