“Black Magic is really looking at how all of these things are being created by black folk and being globally celebrated, but they’re being created under such harsh conditions,” Newsome says. “I’m thinking about, how does one navigate this kind of tornado of trauma and maintain some sense of sanity and create beauty in the process? What is that thing that compels one to do that or sustains one [as they do]?” That, for Newsome, is black magic, something he says he’s been trying to visualize in his entire career as an artist.
While Newsome was studying art history at Tulane University, artists of color were unfortunately and palpably absent from the curriculum. “It was definitely a blind spot and so it was something that needed to be filled. It made me feel a bit invisible,” Newsome says. He responded by creating the kind of work he wanted to see, work that centers not just Blackness, but queerness, and in kind even named his 2016 exhibition at The Studio Museum in Harlem “This is What I Want to See.” “Rather than complaining about it not existing, the great thing about the imagination is that you can imagine what you want to be and create it,” he says.
Uptown New York’s ballroom scene has served as an ongoing muse for Newsome’s artistic practice. While Newsome himself is originally from New Orleans, where he says the ball scene is minimal in comparison, he was first introduced to voguing there and became enamored with it as a dance form. He then saw Paris is Burning, moved to New York, and was introduced to ballroom in the city by a friend while living in an all black, queer collective called Dumba. Voguing became an active part of Newsome’s work in 2008, and he has been working with the community ever since. “I was really fascinated with voguing, but I felt like it was something that was co-opted so early in its creation, like so much black cultural production,” he says. He made video installations saluting the form with Shayne Oliver, later the designer of Hood by Air and Helmut Lang fame, which Newsome exhibited at the 2010 Whitney Biennial, along with an early iteration of FIVE.
Newsome’s work since then, as before, continues to use a multitude of forms to produce what he calls “counter-hegemonic” works inspired by collage and improvisation, pushing against typical artistic narratives. He also hopes to decentralize whiteness in his work, which had for too long dominated cultural discourse in and out of the art world. “I’m speaking to the community, not trying to describe things for this flaneur who’s looking over the shoulder of the people that I’m actually talking to,” Newsome says. “You want people to connect to the work and come into it, and one could argue that in doing that you limit the reach of the work, but I actually would push against that because I feel like another way of dealing with the problems of whiteness is forcing people to put it aside.” This allows for a more nuanced experience of the world, a way to see that doesn’t involve a narrative from which so many were actively excluded. It also allows, Newsome hopes, for a liberation of the mind.
Newsome’s work brings ballroom into the contemporary art space, from where it had for too long been excluded. While it has become a part of a more mainstream cultural narrative in the last few years with beloved shows like Pose, ballroom had always been important to the communities it came from. It was never a fad there, and it has always been an art form. Dawn Ebony, Legendary Mother of the House of Ebony, is a frequent collaborator of Newsome’s and loves seeing the way he celebrates the form. “I can’t speak enough of how he’s created this whole new genre of ballroom outside of ballroom, infusing and helping artists in different spectrums come together to understand the form of vogue in its entirety as art,” she says, and believes his work can inspire those who’ve never been to a ball to go see actual performances. “He is the bridge needed to close the gap.”
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