Newsome is being hosted by the School of Education’s Art Department and presented by UW–Madison’s Division of the Arts. First Wave Learning Community, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the School of Education’s Dance Department will be co-sponsoring Newsome’s residency.

He combines several disciplines in his work, including collage, performance, film, and computer programming. Newsome tells The Capital Times, “I like the idea of transforming these certain elements into other things.”

Newsome’s spring course, called “The Gesture of Collage as Practice,” draws students from a variety of disciplines and experiments with different media, like collage, movement, sound design, and creative coding. The underlying purpose of this course is to examine the power of media and popular culture to shape views of race, class, and sexuality.

Growing up in New Orleans, Newsome’s interest in art began at an early age. He tells The Capital Times that his father was a singer, and that Newsome and his brother often performed with him.

Newsome attributes his unorthodox training practices — skipping grad school, jumping from medium to medium — to his unique artistic process of interpreting documentation into movement, and then taking that documentation and putting it into performance.

He wants to take his practice and use it as a framework to guide students into thinking in an interdisciplinary way. According to The Capital Times, Newsome wanted his students to walk away with “the gift of critical thinking,” which he cites as the key to making impactful artwork.

Newsome’s course will include many individual projects, but it will end with a collective project that will come to a head in their final exhibition, which Newsome considers to be more of an experience. Newsome tells The Capital Times, “I’ve been keeping it open because I want them to express themselves. I’m giving them the tools to build the house. How that house gets built is really on them.”

Read the entire Capital Times interview here.