King of Arms
2015 · 2m · USA
Directed by Rashaad Newsome
Genres: experimental
Tones: mythic, provocative, theatrical
A single-channel video installation component in which Newsome combines sound, a hand-carved crown sculpture finished in automotive paint, artist textile, and HD rear projection to compose a heraldic meditation on Black identity, nobility, and ball culture.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Newsome's heraldic repurposing is a fully legible art-historical argument: he takes the most canonical Western European symbol of noble identity and rewrites it in the vocabulary of Black queer performance culture. The Whitney Biennial and MoMA PS1 contexts establish him as a serious institutional figure.
Newsome's heraldry-meets-Black-iconography is one of the smartest structural appropriations in recent video art. The 1:43 runtime is a sampler though — judging from a fragment.
Newsome repopulates European heraldry — crown, coat of arms, ceremonial frame — entirely with Black ball-culture iconography. A 1:43 video-installation excerpt, more documentation than standalone work, but the structural argument lands.