Rashaad Newsome Response

            Rashaad Newsome’s artist talk was a video and audio sensory experience. His videos, performance pieces, sculptures, and collages blend high and low art cultures, and the result is a unique and intriguing combination of classical and contemporary. His show Heraldry, originally inspired by wrought iron grills in Paris, features large collages in which he uses hip-hop culture icons to construct both copies of and original coats of arms. In his later work, Pursuivant, these collages sit on beautiful, intricate patterned backgrounds, and ornate frames border them. Newsome spent a lot of time researching coats of arms in order to create his own in this work, and even became a pursuivant of arms.

            Something I noticed about Rashaad Newsome is that he cares very much about the research behind his work. When he creates a piece, he is able to speak eloquently about it and the meaning behind the subject that inspired it. In his series of work about the style of dance known as vogueing, he explained the two types of vogueing and where the dance originated. In this work, he collaborates with dancers and musicians to create video art. He tracks the coordinates of the dancers’ movements on a computer, and then transcribes these movements into line drawings. He is currently working on a piece in which these coordinates are transcribed three-dimensionally.

            My personal favorite piece Rashaad Newsome exhibited in his talk was a video series called The Conductor. In these music videos, Newsome hip-hop remixed the famous cantata Carmina Burana and set each of the six movements to edited hip-hop music videos. He only played three through six, but I was totally mesmerized. The bass echoed throughout the auditorium and the beats were complex but listenable. It sounded like a contemporary hip-hop track with an edgy high art flavor. The images that accompanied the music were choppy, quickly moving cuts of similar themes in rap and hip-hop videos, like hand gestures, gyrating female dancers, mouths and teeth, and hair flipping. It was confusing but spellbinding – I couldn’t stop watching. I even tried to find it online when I got home to listen to it again. It was hard to find, but I did eventually. It didn’t have the same effect played through my tiny laptop speakers, though.

            Overall, I really enjoyed Rashaad Newsome’s work. I am always interested in the combination of high and low art. Bridging that gap distorts the definition of these labels: what is the difference between high and low art if the two can be combined and interchanged? I also love how his work exposes the viewer to contemporary hip-hop culture through a new lens.