Assembly Is an Ambitious, Joyful Collage of Black Art and Voguing

The art of collage is the art of layering, of juxtaposition, of conversation between related and unrelated materials. It’s making something greater than the sum of its parts. In Assembly, the immersive experience now at the Park Avenue Armory through March 6, Rashaad Newsome layers, juxtaposes, and creates conversation between multiple artistic and technological disciplines to explore the structures of oppression in search of Black liberation. As serious as that sounds, it also exudes joyfulness.

Newsome is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York and Oakland, Calif., whose creative practices include photography and music as well as software engineering and community organizing, all of which he brings to Assembly, along with artificial intelligence, dance, sculpture, and a healthy dose of academic theory. The program itself is also something of a collage, comprising a large-scale exhibition in the Armory’s gargantuan Wade Thompson Drill Hall; a pedagogic workshop that’s part dance class, part lecture, part exercise in self-reflection; and a 75-minute performance that most successfully fuses and embodies Newsome’s ideas. (The exhibition and daytime workshops require one ticket; evening performances require another.)