Rashaad Newsome, Artist Fellow

Rashaad Newsome is the Inaugural Artist Fellow for The Racial Reckoning in Art & Performance at Yale. 

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 walks the tightrope between social practice and abstraction. Collage acts as a conceptual and technical method to construct a new visual, performance, and literary language that highlight the immaterial and material expressivity related to Black American Life. 

Rashaad holds a 2023 honorary Doctorate Degree in Fine Arts from the University of Connecticut and a 2001 BFA in Art History from Tulane University. Newsome’s work is in numerous public and private collections. They have 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 Park Avenue Armory (NYC), The Whitney Museum (NYC), Brooklyn Museum (NYC), MoMAPS1 (NYC), SFMOMA (CA), LACMA (CA), New Orleans Museum of Art (LA), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Hayward Gallery (London), Centro de Arte dos de Mayo (Spain), and Garage Center for Contemporary Culture (Moscow). Recent awards for their work include the 2022 Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica Award For Computer Animation, the 2021 Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship, Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence artist residency, 2019, and LACMA Art + Technology Lab Grant.