Rashaad Newsome

Visual and performance artist Rashaad Newsome stages his cerebral, wildly amusing Shade Compositions 2009 tonight through Saturday at The Kitchen. Newsome says much of his work is "an interrogation of the notion of class," and that he is interested in exploring "the desire for power by people in subalterian positions." Me, too.

Shade Compositions strikes me as a sort of post-modern "Four Women"-- although tonight's presentation will involve twenty lovelies. The work hinges on the re-presentation of familiar gestural movements and sounds-- the teeth sucking, the foot stomping, the eye rolling, and the guttural expressions of disdain birthed by Black women and ironically expropriated across racial, cultural, sexual, and socioeconomic lines. Newsome is interested, he says, in marrying so-called high culture with so-called low culture-- in injecting "ghetto elements into the canonized white box" and adding new language to discourse of contemporary art.




Shade Compositions 2009 will be presented alongside performance artist Kalup Linzy's Comedy, Tragdy, Sketches of Me. If you're in New York:

Kalup Linzy and Rashaad Newsome
February 12 and 13 at 8pm
February 14 at 5 pm
The Kitchen
512 W. 19th Street
New York, NY 10011
Get tickets