Rashaad Newsome: STOP PLAYING IN MY FACE! & ICON

Presented By

Museum of the African Diaspora


Concurrent with Rashaad Newsome’s To Be Real exhibition and Running performances at the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, the Museum of the African Diaspora’s (MoAD) presents Newsome’s STOP PLAYING IN MY FACE! and ICON through March 1, 2020. Exhibited in MoAd’s downtown museum, Newsome’s exhibition focuses on video works inspired by the origins and continued dynamism of Vogue, a dance phenomenon that emerged from Harlem’s queer ballroom scene. Rashaad Newsome is a multidisciplinary artist whose work blends several practices together including collage, sculpture, film, music, computer programming, and performance, to form an altogether new field. He pulls intuitively from the world of advertising, the Internet, Black and Queer culture to craft compositions that walk the tightrope between intersectionality, social practice, and abstraction.

About the Artist

Rashaad Newsome is a multidisciplinary artist whose work brings together collage, sculpture, film, music, computer programming, and performance to form an altogether new field.  He pulls intuitively from the world of advertising, the Internet, Black and Queer culture to produce counter-hegemonic works.  Using diasporic traditions of improvisation and collage, Newsome crafts compositions that walk a tightrope among intersectionality, social practice, and abstraction.

Newsome lives and works in New York City.  He has exhibited and performed in galleries, museums, institutions, and festivals throughout the world, and his work is in numerous public collections including The Studio Museum in Harlem (NYC); Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC); The Brooklyn Museum (NYC); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA); and The National Museum of African American History and Culture (DC), among others.