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Rashaad Newsome: ICON

August 11, 2017 – December 3, 2017

Rashaad Newsome, Stop Playing in My Face! (video still), 2016. Single-channel video with sound, 04:02 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and De Buck Gallery, NY.
overview

Rashaad Newsome is a New York based artist whose multidisciplinary practice combines collage, video, music, computer programming, and performance. On view in the museum’s Imprint Gallery, this exhibition focuses solely on the video-based component of the artist’s larger practice, and highlights works that showcase his engagement with the dance phenomenon of voguing. Although voguing emerged from Harlem’s queer ballroom scene during the 1960s and 70s, the dance style entered the cultural mainstream in 1990 with Madonna’s iconic music video “Vogue,” now remembered as a notorious instance of cultural appropriation. Newsome, however, celebrates the true origins of voguing, thereby reclaiming a vital cultural history by giving it back to the queer Black and Latino community from which it arose.