Rashaad Newsome: Running

To celebrate the opening week of Rashaad Newsome’s To Be Real, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture (FMCAC) and San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) will present Newsome’s immersive performance, Running, on January 17 and 18, 2020.  In this abstract portrait of soul, composed for light and voice, three singers explore the “vocal run”: a musicology term for a rapid series of ascending or descending musical notes, usually improvised and sung in quick succession.  With the vocalists Kyron El, Aaron Marcellus, and Devin Michael from its New York City premiere, Running features an original score composed by the artist, incorporating samples of vocal runs by Aretha Franklin, Patti LaBelle, Whitney Houston, Marvin Gaye, B.B. King, James Brown, and Kelly Price, among others.

Running will be presented on January 17 and 18, 2020 at 7:00 p.m. in Gallery 308.  Tickets are $20/$15 for seniors, students, and members.

JUST ADDED: After the Saturday (1/18) show, guests are invited to stay for an artist talk with Newsome.

Open concurrently with Running and To Be Real, the Museum of the African Diaspora’s (MoAD) presentation of Newsome’s STOP PLAYING IN MY FACE! and Icon continues through March 1, 2020. The 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. For more information, please visit MoAD.

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.