Rashaad Newsome uses performance, video, and collage to investigate power and status associated with people of color and the gay community. Newsome borrows intensively from hip-hop music and popular culture to create work that challenges current ideas regarding social protocol and hierarchy as they relate to human behavior. What is considered “high class” or “low class?" How do these perceptions shape our views of others? Newsome reconfigures images, gestures, and sounds that are associated with groups of individuals who have been marginalized to question not only their meaning, but the legitimacy of cultural ownership.
Newsome has exhibited his work extensively including the 2010 Whitney Biennial, MoMA PS1, and profiled in Art in America.
