Artist Talk: Rashaad Newsome

Black Alchemy: Art, Technology, and the Queer Imagination

In Rashaad Newsome’s work, gesture becomes sound, movement becomes image, and cultural memory becomes a force for technological invention. In this talk, the artist and filmmaker will trace the role of technology across a practice spanning collage, sculpture, film, performance, sound, and immersive installation, sharing the personal experiences, questions, and experiments that connect these forms.

Drawing on works including Shade Compositions, King of Arms, Assembly, and Being the Digital Griot, Newsome will explore how Black cultural production and queer embodied knowledge shape his approach to motion capture, animation, robotics, holography, and machine learning. Collage and improvisation emerge as ways of thinking across disciplines, bringing bodies, images, sound, and computational systems into new relationships.

Grounded in Black feminist thought and decolonial frameworks, the talk considers technology as a site of struggle over identity, power, and possibility. Newsome will reflect on how artistic practice can challenge inherited systems of representation, extend the live arts, and create spaces for collective imagination. From the expressive intelligence of performance to an AI conceived as a digital griot, these works ask how cultural memory can help shape more liberatory futures.

Seating is first-come, first-served and everyone is welcome. 

-

Rashaad Newsome is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker whose practice spans collage, sculpture, moving image, music, performance, and emerging technologies. Drawing on Black and queer culture and diasporic traditions of improvisation, he explores how art can reshape systems of power and representation. His work has been presented internationally at institutions including Park Avenue Armory, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou, and the Hayward Gallery. His honors include the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica, a 2025 Creative Capital Award, and a 2025 United States Artists Fellowship.

Conversations in Contemporary Art is a free event series sponsored by Concordia University's Studio Arts MFA Program. The series provides a unique opportunity to hear artists, designers, critics, writers, educators, and curators share their practice(s) and perspectives. 

This series is made possible through the generous support of Lillian and Billy Mauer.