LACMA × Snapchat: Monumental Perspectives (Collection III) | Self Inventions by Rashaad Newsome

Newsome draws comparisons between the labor performed by robots and the unpaid, compulsory service Black people have had to perform historically. In the face of untenable circumstances, Black culture has not only survived and adapted, but has found a way to flourish. This is the exciting yet vexing task of creating Blackness, a process that many of the residents in the Exposition Park area have long been engaged in. The figures in Self Invention are the “engineers of themselves,” paying homage to the legacy of Black resistance, carrying forward a history of endless innovation.
Composition by Rashaad Newsome
Lens Creator: Michael French
This initiative is made possible by Snapchat. Major support for the initiative is provided by the Mellon Foundation.
Rashaad Newsome, Self Inventions, 2023, in collaboration with LACMA × Snapchat: Monumental Perspectives, © Rashaad Newsome, image courtesy of Snap Inc.
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About the Artist Rashaad Newsome
Rashaad Newsome's work blends several practices, including collage, sculpture, film, CGI, photography, music, computer programming, software engineering, community organizing, and performance, to create a divergent field that rejects classification. Using the diasporic traditions of improvisation, he pulls from the world of advertising, the internet, art history, Black culture, and Queer culture to produce counter-hegemonic work that walks the tightrope between social practice and abstraction. Collage acts as a conceptual and technical method to make visible the density of encrypted epigenetic material Black and Black queer people embody. His work celebrates Black contributions to the art canon and creates innovative and inclusive forms of culture and media.
Newsome was born in 1979 in New Orleans, Louisiana where he received a BFA in Art History at Tulane University in 2001. He has exhibited and performed in galleries, museums, institutions, and festivals internationally.
www.lacma.org/...
About LACMA × Snapchat: Monumental Perspectives
Monumental Perspectives brings together artists and technologists to create augmented reality monuments that explore just some of the histories of Los Angeles communities in an effort to highlight perspectives from across the region. In consultation with community leaders and historians, the third and final cohort of artists, Victoria Fu, Yassi Mazandi, Rashaad Newsome, Rubén Ortiz Torres, and Alison Saar, use the lens of collective ancestral memory to examine the individual and communal legacies we leave today.
www.lacma.org/...
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About LACMA
Located on the Pacific Rim, LACMA is the largest art museum in the western United States, with a collection of nearly 152,000 objects that illuminate 6,000 years of artistic expression across the globe. Committed to showcasing a multitude of art histories, LACMA exhibits and interprets works of art from new and unexpected points of view that are informed by the region’s rich cultural heritage and diverse population. LACMA’s spirit of experimentation is reflected in its work with artists, technologists, and thought leaders as well as in its regional, national, and global partnerships to share collections and programs, create pioneering initiatives, and engage new audiences.
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