Times Square Arts Presents Rashaad Newsome's BLACK MAGIC For December Midnight Moment

Times Square Arts, the largest public platform for contemporary performance and visual arts, is pleased to present Black Magic by multimedia artist Rashaad Newsome for the month of December as part of the organization's signature Midnight Moment series. Midnight Moment is the world's largest, longest-running digital art exhibition, synchronized on electronic billboards throughout Times Square nightly from 11:57pm to midnight. Black Magic is a special co-commission with Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art launching on World AIDS Day.

To celebrate the month-long presentation of Black Magic in Times Square, the artist will host a special live dance performance to kick-off the month at 11:30pm on December 10, 2020. The outdoor performance will be an open air event with specially cleared space between dancers and fellow audience members to allow for ample social distancing. Viewers will be asked to wear masks and stay socially distanced. Up-to-date guidance from New York City's Department of Health can be found here.

Rashaad Newsome returns to the screens of Times Square with Black Magic, a multi-channel work that combines improvisational performance with his signature animations of mesmerizing, vibrant, and intricately designed graphics. Black Magic is Newsome's second Midnight Moment, his first being The Conductor in 2015.

Newsome's Black Magic combines the footage from FIVE, a live vogue performance, with King of Arms Tincture, an animated graphic pattern which references the architecture, design, and decorative wallpaper of a typical New Orleans lounge and which will also appear on the façade of the Leslie-Lohman Museum at 26 Wooster Street in Soho in December. For this new video artwork, Newsome asked a cast of New York-based performers to respond to and personally reinterpret the idea of 'Black Magic.' Newsome has long been inspired by the traditions of performance and improvisation born out of Black liberation movements, and he frequently celebrates and references these creative expressions in his work.

Newsome sees the form of voguing in Black Magic as an open-source code with a language based on five elements: hands performance, catwalk, floor performance, spin dips, and duck-walking. Every performer translates this language into their own new code that is shared and learned by another dancer, thus leading to an advanced system comprising all the languages before it.

As a historic gathering place for celebration, protest, and performance, Times Square is a fitting platform for Newsome's work. To expand on Newsome's idea of dance as a powerful form of resistance and survival, this new iteration of Black Magic will make its world premiere co-commissioned with Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art on World AIDS Day - December 1, 2020.