Rashaad Newsome’s ‘Assembly’ Recasts the Park Avenue Armory as a Site of Liberation
A new documentary follows Rashaad Newsome as he builds Assembly, a sprawling work that transforms the Wade Thompson Drill Hall at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory into something closer to a living social experiment than a conventional installation. Co-directed by Newsome and Johnny Symons, the film traces how the artist assembled a project that moves between technology, collage, sculpture, video, music, and performance.
For Newsome, the setting is inseparable from the work’s meaning. As a gay Black man, he is acutely aware that the Armory’s vast interior is lined with portraits of white military officers. Rather than treating that history as a fixed backdrop, he frames Assembly as a reclamation. “I have never truly felt protected in this country,” he says in the film. “I think this show is a reclaiming. There’ll be a new kind of drill happening in here. A drill that’s associated with liberation. These spaces are everybody’s spaces.”
The work itself was built through collaboration. Newsome invited people to submit performance clips and brought dancers to New York from Japan, Ukraine, Brazil, and other places. Together, they developed a movement language made up of five elements: hand performance, catwalk, floor performance, spin dips, and duck walking. Newsome describes the result as an “open source code,” with dancers functioning as programmers in what he calls a “global hackathon or code fest.”
At the center of the classroom-like dimension of the project is Being, Newsome’s non-binary AI host. He describes the figure as a griot, the West African storyteller, historian, artist, and healer. With a head resembling a Congolese mask and a stylized body, Being conducts workshops and answers questions, extending the work’s conversation beyond the gallery floor. Newsome says he imagined an artwork that could do more than initiate dialogue: it could participate in it, drawing on thinkers such as bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Michel Foucault, and Audre Lorde.
The installation also includes video-mapped walls, fractal imagery, and a 40-foot hologram of dancers. Over three weeks, the Armory hosted evening performances ranging from rap and spoken word to musical theater, dance, and opera. Among the participating artists are Kyron EL, Maleek Washington, Kameron N. Saunders, and Omari Wiles.
The documentary presents Assembly as both spectacle and proposition: a work in which Black and queer performers are not only visible, but centered within a space that Newsome insists belongs to everyone. Assembly premieres on PBS’s Independent Lens on 22 June.
