Rashaad Newsome

Rashaad Newsome is a multidisciplinary artist whose work blends several practices — collage, sculpture, video, music, computer programming, and performance — to form an altogether new field. Newsome’s work examines the visual language of power and status, juxtaposing high and low references to challenge perceived notions of social protocol and hierarchy. Using the equalizing force of sampling, he crafts compositions that surprise in their associative potential and walk the tightrope between identity politics, social practice and abstraction. Newsome has exhibited and performed in galleries, museums, institutions, and festivals throughout the world, including The Whitney Museum (NYC), Brooklyn Museum (NYC), MoMA PS1 (NYC), SFMOMA (CA), New Orleans Museum of Art (LA), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France), and the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture (Moscow, Russia). He has received multiple honors and awards for his work, including a 2014 Headlands Center for the Arts Visiting Artist Residency, and a 2011 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award.

With support from the University of Michigan Museum of Art and the UMMA Student Engagement Council, Institute for the Humanities, and the University Musical Society (UMS).