Rashaad Newsome
Rashaad Newson (1979–) is an American artist working at the intersection of assemblage, technology, sculpture, video, music, and performance. Newsome's work celebrates and abstracts Black and Queer contributions to the art canon, resulting in innovative and inclusive forms of culture and media. His modern mashups of Baroque arabesques and flourishes, gilded American frames, symbolic heraldry, and hip hop associations form potent signs of the times. The idea of salvage in his work represents a further continuity with aesthetic approaches to assemblage gleaned in growing up in New Orleans and which is vivid in the ethos of Southern art.
Newsome’s work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the de Young Museum, both in San Francisco, California; the Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, California; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, to name a few. His many honors and awards for his work include a Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence artist residency, Eyebeam Rapid Response Fellowship, a LACMA Art + Technology Lab Grant, and a BAVC Media Maker Fellowship.
