Rashaad Newsome

Acclaimed multidisciplinary artist Rashaad Newsome, known for their blending of collage, video, performance, computer programming, and more to explore Black and queer cultural contributions and expression, is joined in conversation with The Phillips Collection Senior Consulting Curator Dr. Adrienne Childs. Includes a screening of their film Hands Performance.

About Rashaad Newsome

Rashaad Newsome’s work blends several practices, including collage, sculpture, film & video, animation, photography, music, writing, computer programming, software engineering, community organizing, and performance, to create a divergent field that mirrors the intersectionality of their lived experience. Using the diasporic traditions of improvisation, they pull from the world of advertising, the internet, art history, Black and Queer culture to produce counter-hegemonic work that shifts between social practice and abstraction. Collage acts as a conceptual and technical method to construct a new visual, performance, sonic, machine learning, and literary language that highlights the immaterial and material expressivity related to Black American life. Newsome holds a 2023 Doctoral degree in Fine Arts from the University of Connecticut and a 2001 BFA in Art History from Tulane University. In 2005 studied MAX/MSP Programming at Harvestworks Digital Media Art Center and holds a 2002 certificate of study in Digital Post Production from Film/Video Arts Inc.

IMAGE: Rashaad Newsome, The Art of Immortality 2, 2009, Collage in custom mahogany and resin artist frame with automotive paint, 66 5/8 x 66 5/8 x 4 1/2 in., Courtesy of the artist