EXHIBIT/PERFORMANCE: Rashaad Newsome

Detail from Rashaad Newsome, FIVE (Biennial), 2010. Image courtesy of The Drawing Center, NY.

FIVE (The Drawing Center)

March 6 – 11, 2014

Performance: Thursday, March 6 at 6:30pm

Event is free, but an RSVP is required. Please email info@drawingcenter.org

THE DRAWING CENTER

35 Wooster Street

New York, NY

The Drawing Center will present FIVE (The Drawing Center), a multimedia performance that highlights the art of vogue, a dance form characterized by angular and linear body movements and the assumption of a series of rigid poses inspired by the stylized poses of high fashion models on the catwalk and in the pages of magazines. As Newsome's work illuminates, it also evokes a number of qualities long associated with the medium of drawing: the latter's emphasis on repeated gestures; its mapping of time and space.

For FIVE (The Drawing Center), New York-based vogue dancers and musicians, including renowned opera singer Stefanos Koroneoss and distinguished vogue commentator Kevin Jz Prodigy, will perform and be conducted by Newsome. The artist challenges the ephemeral nature of live performance by employing a specially designed motion-tracking software (that traces flashes of color in real time), translating the dancers’ dexterous gestures into colorful linear abstractions that will appear on his laptop during the performance via live video feed and subsequently be

printed as works on paper. In addition to the evening performance, The Drawing Center’s presentation will feature video documentation from FIVE (ARTHK), originally performed at the 2012 Hong Kong International Art Fair, as well as five multi-colored drawings from that performance. Produced by Joanna Kleinberg Romanow, Assistant Curator.

ABOUT RASHAAD NEWSOME

Rashaad Newsome (b. 1979, New Orleans, Louisiana) earned his BFA from Tulane University in New Orleans in 2001. He has had numerous solo exhibitions at institutions such as The New Orleans Museum of Art, LA (2013), The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT (2011), The Syracuse University Art Galleries, Syracuse, NY (2010), and has participated in group exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2012), The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2012), MoMA PS1, New York (2010), the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010), and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2010). Newsome was the recipient of The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 2011 and the SVA/LMCC Visiting Artist Award in 2008.

PUBLICATION

To accompany FIVE (The Drawing Center), The Drawing Center will produce an edition in the Drawing Papers series that will include an introduction by Joanna Kleinberg Romanow and an essay by Evan Garza, an independent curator and co-founder and Assistant Director of Fire Island Artist Residency, as well as a selection of color images from the artist’s previous performances and drawings produced from those performances.

CREDITS

Rashaad Newsome: FIVE (The Drawing Center) is made possible through the generous support of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s Artistic Innovation and Collaboration Program, which supports risk-taking and innovative collaborations in the spirit of Robert Rauschenberg

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