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Collectively, the images in this story touch on long-standing themes in my work, such as the importance of community specifically for Black Queer folks, the relationship between Blacks and abstraction, and Black folks and technology(past, present, and speculative future). To support me in this endeavor, I sent images to friends and colleagues and asked them to respond to them with a quote, text, or poem, and here are the results of our conversation.
The story starts with a CGI image of a chain and medallion that says PUNKS, an attempt to reclaim a word used against many Black Queer men in our youth to break us. The image is accompanied by a text/cosign from legendary filmmaker Patrik-Ian Polk whose film of the same name was the first to depict Black gay male life. Dazie Grego Sykes's poem responds to image depicting the brokenness of Black Queer existence and the importance of healing. This theme is continued through works inspired by intimate portraits of Black Gay men showing love and tenderness for one another with text by Darnell L. Moore and Antwaun Sargent. It then moves on to works that celebrate the radicality of the gender-variant part of our community with words from Alok Vaid-Menon and Legacy Russell. We then move into pieces that explore our legacy of resistance using tech advancement as a jumping-off point with a text by Ruha Benjamin and explore the concept of the multiverse within the context of Black being with a poem from Black Quantum Futurism. Finally, we travel far beyond the realms of Afro-Futurism and land deep into the Black Fantastic with words from writer, journalist, broadcaster, and curator Ekow Eshun and James Baldwin. All images were created by Rashaad Newsome and ©Rashaad Newsome Studio.
About the artist
Rashaad Newsome’s work blends several practices, including collage, assemblage, sculpture, film, video, 3D animation, 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 and Queer culture to produce counter-hegemonic work that walks the tightrope between social practice, abstraction, and intersectionality. Collage acts as a conceptual and technical method to construct a new cultural framework of power that does not find the oppression of others necessary. Newsome’s work celebrates Black contributions to the art canon and creates innovative and inclusive forms of culture and media.
Newsome lives and works between Brooklyn, New York City, Oakland, and Los Angeles California. He was born in 1979 in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he received a BFA in Art History at Tulane University in 2001. In 2004, he received a certificate of study in Digital Post Production from Film/Video Arts Inc. (NYC). In 2005 he studied MAX/MSP Programming at Harvestworks Digital Media Art Center (NYC). He has exhibited and performed in galleries, museums, institutions, and festivals throughout the world, including The Studio Museum in Harlem (NYC), The National Museum of African American History and Culture (DC), The Park Avenue Armory Drill Hall (NYC), The Whitney Museum (NYC), Brooklyn Museum (NYC), MoMAPS1 (NYC), Museum of the African Diaspora (SF, CA), SFMOMA (CA), New Orleans Museum of Art (LA), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Hayward Gallery (London), CA2M Centro de Arte dos de Mayo (Spain), The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture (Moscow), and MUSA (Vienna). Newsome’s work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Studio Museum in Harlem (NYC), Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC), The Brooklyn Museum of Art (NYC), The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), The de Young Museum (CA), The Oakland Museum of California (CA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LA), McNay Art Museum (TX), Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VA), The Chazen Museum of Art (WI), National Museum of African American History and Culture (DC) and The New Britain Museum of American Art (CT). In 2010 he participated in the Whitney Biennial (NYC), and in 2011 Greater New York at MoMAPS1 (NYC).
About the contributors
Ruha Benjamin is a sociologist and a Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. The primary focus of her work is the relationship between innovation and equity, particularly focusing on the intersection of race, justice, and technology. Benjamin is the author of numerous publications, including People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (2013) and Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019).
Patrik-Ian Polk is an American director, screenwriter, and producer noted for his films and theatre work that explores the experiences and stories of African-American LGBT people. Polk made his feature film directorial debut with Punks (2000), an independent film he wrote and produced that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2004, Polk created the television series Noah's Arc, which made its debut on Logo in October 2005 and ran for two seasons. After which, Polk wrote, directed, and produced a film spin-off, Noah's Arc: Jumping the Broom, released theatrically in 2008. His subsequent feature films, The Skinny, starring Jussie Smollett, and Blackbird, starring Mo'Nique, Julian Walker, and Isaiah Washington, were released in 2012 and 2015, following festival runs.
Dazié Rustin Grego-Sykes is an Oakland, California-based performance artist. He is a graduate of The Experimental Performance Institute at New College. It was there he learned to transform spoken-word into solo plays. Dazié's first full-length performance I Am A Man is a multidisciplinary solo work which focuses on the ways in which gay men of color claim and hold their masculinity. I Am A Man was performed as part of the National Queer Arts Festival in 2010 and 2012. He is one of the original members of The Deep Dickollective one of the nation's first black gay hip-hop groups and Queer Identified Objects which created original performance work about gender and queer identity.
Darnell L. Moore is an American writer and activist whose work is informed by anti-racist, feminist, queer of color, and anti-colonial thought and advocacy. Darnell's essays, social commentary, poetry, and interviews have appeared in various national and international media venues, including the Feminist Wire, Ebony magazine, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, and The Advocate.
Alok Vaid-Menon is an American writer, performance artist, and media personality who performs under the moniker ALOK. Alok is gender non-conforming and transfeminine, and uses the singular they third person pronouns. As a mixed-media artist Alok uses poetry, comedy, performance, lecture, sound-art, fashion design, self-portraiture, and social media to explore themes of gender, race, trauma, belonging, and the human condition.
Legacy Russell is an American curator, writer, and author of Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, published by Verso Books in 2020. In 2021, the performance and experimental art institution The Kitchen announced Russell as the organization's next executive director and chief curator. From 2018 to 2021, she was the associate curator of exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Antwaun Sargent is an American writer, editor, and curator, living in New York City. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and various art publications. Sargent is the author of The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion (Aperture) and the editor of Young, Gifted, and Black: A New Generation of Artists (DAP). He has championed Black art and fashion by young Black photographers and has built a youth culture around it. He is also a director at Gagosian Gallery.
Black Quantum Futurism Collective is a multidisciplinary collaboration between Camae Ayewa (Rockers!; Moor Mother) and Rasheedah Phillips (The AfroFuturist Affair; Metropolarity) exploring the intersections of futurism, creative media, DIY-aesthetics, and activism in marginalized communities through an alternative temporal lens. BQF Collective has created a number of community-based events, experimental music projects, performances, exhibitions, zines, and anthologies of experimental essays on space-time consciousness. BQF Collective is a 2016 A Blade of Grass Fellow, 2015 artist-in-residence at West Philadelphia Neighborhood Time Exchange, and had their experimental short, Black Bodies as Conductors of Gravity, premiere at the 2015 Afrofuturism Now! Festival in Rotterdam. BQF Collective frequently collaborates with other Black Futurists Joy KMT, Irreversible Entanglements, Thomas Stanley, Ras Mashramani, Alex Smith to produce literature, present workshops, lectures, and performances.
Ekow Eshun is a British writer, journalist, broadcaster, and curator. He is the editor-in-chief of the quarterly magazine Tank, a former editor of Arena magazine, and the former director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. He is Chair of the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group and Creative Director of Calvert 22 Foundation.
James Baldwin was a writer and civil rights activist who is best known for his semi-autobiographical novels and plays that center on race, politics, and sexuality.
About the magazine
FACT Magazine is an ever-evolving platform for electronic art, championing the new wave of creativity. WWW.FACTMAG.COM