SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Jessica Silverman announced representation of Oakland and Brooklyn-based artist Rashaad Newsome, known for his multidisciplinary practice combining collage, sculpture, film, photography, music, computer programming, software engineering, community organizing, and performance. Informed by diasporic and Black queer modalities and imaginations, Newsome’s work unravels and investigates social categories, systems of knowledge, and representations to construct new forms of common understanding and being. The artist has previously exhibited with Jessica Silverman in the group exhibition We Are Here in Spring 2021 and will have a solo exhibition at the gallery in 2022.
“Rashaad and I met in 2019 and spent much of 2020 in conversation about his artistic practice. I was impressed with the dynamism of his work and the variety of media over which he has mastery. The gallery is committed to working with the strongest voices of the San Francisco Bay Area, so I am thrilled Rashaad is joining our roster and look forward to his solo show with us in 2022.”
Newsome’s work is a meeting place of varying and intersecting disciplines, much of which draws from commodified or co-opted elements of the Black experience by mass culture. The artist uses the methods of collage both formally and philosophically to disassemble what he sees in the world and construct images that provide space to think through a more nuanced sense of Blackness, one that reflects a legacy of selfpastiching, exploitation, and regulation.
The artist similarly creates a poetics of unrestrained movement in performance or technology-driven works spanning automobiles, mobile apps, and video works, celebrating and energizing the multiplicity of Black queer existence. His approach to ballroom culture–itself massively commodified since its origins in 1970s New York– demonstrates both a return and reinvention of the form to present gender as a construct, as well as offering a more democratic space to communicate art theory and history. Throughout the rich variety of his output, Newsome pulls from such a vast array of identifiers and symbols present in contemporary media and culture, shattering limitations on expression and belonging.
Newsome lives and works between Brooklyn New York City and Oakland California. He was born in 1979 in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he received a BFA in Art History at Tulane University in 2001. In 2004, he received a certificate of study in Digital Post Production from Film/Video Arts Inc. (NYC). In 2005 he studied MAX/MSP Programming at Harvestworks Digital Media Art Center (NYC). He has exhibited and performed in galleries, museums, institutions, and festivals throughout the world including The Studio Museum in Harlem (NYC), The National Museum of African American History and Culture (DC), The Whitney Museum (NYC), Brooklyn Museum (NYC), MoMAPS1 (NYC), SFMOMA (CA), New Orleans Museum of Art (LA), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture (Moscow), and MUSA (Vienna). Newsome’s work is in numerous public collections including the Studio Museum in Harlem, Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC), The Brooklyn Museum of Art (NYC), The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, McNay Art Museum (TX), The Chazen Museum of Art (WI), National Museum of African American History and Culture (DC) and The New Britain Museum of American Art (CT). In 2010 he participated in the Whitney Biennial (NYC), and in 2011 Greater New York at MoMAPS1 (NYC).
