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. He seamlessly merges art, code, film, and community-building to create immersive experiences that explore the intersections of Blackness, queerness, and futurism. 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. 

Assembly, his groundbreaking exhibition and film, brings together dancers, artificial intelligence, animation, collage, sculpture, holography, and soundscapes to reimagine collective liberation. Central to this work is Being, the Digital Griot — an AI-powered entity that embodies radical storytelling. Acting as both mirror and provocateur, Being demonstrates AI’s potential as a tool for liberation rather than control. 

Newsome will offer an in-depth exploration of the conceptual frameworks and processes behind Assembly and Being. He will discuss how his work dismantles systems of oppression and reimagines physical and digital spaces as arenas for liberation. Through dynamic storytelling, dance, and the collaboration between human and non-human performers, Newsome pushes artistic boundaries while sparking critical conversations about how art and technology can shape futures beyond binary thinking, paving the way for a more liberated world.

Newsome has exhibited and performed in galleries, museums, institutions, and festivals throughout the world, including The Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, SFMOMA, New Orleans Museum of Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, and the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture. 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.

In tandem with Newsome’s appearance in the Penny Stamps Series, the Institute for the Humanities is hosting Chimera, an immersive exhibition built around a newly commissioned film of the same name. This exhibition reflects a bold shift in Newsome’s practice toward sci-fi filmmaking, layering the architecture of film, movement, and world-building to probe themes of identity, resistance, and creation. Chimera opens directly following this event at the Institute for the Humanities gallery with an opening reception and artist meet and greet. Chimera will be on view from January 16 through February 28, 2025 at the Institute for the Humanities Gallery. 

Presented in partnership with the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities. This project was made possible by a grant from the Arts Initiative at the University of Michigan.

Series presenting partners: Detroit PBS, ALL ARTS, and PBS Books. Media partner: Michigan Public.