August 27, 2026–February 15, 2027
Goodman Gallery
Against a spare, unadorned backdrop, a lone dancer—Shayne Oliver—freestyles for the camera, his body cycling through the dips, spins, and hand performance of vogue, a dance form born in the ballroom culture of Harlem’s queer Black and Latino communities. In 1970s and 1980s New York City, queer ballroom culture innovated vogue as a form of dance, carving out a space for LGBTQ people of color to find community and to foster a sense of belonging, safety, and support.
Newsome, himself a member and documentarian of that scene, did not simply record Oliver’s improvisation. He filmed it, cut the footage into a new sequence of gestures, and then had Oliver relearn and reperform that invented choreography for the camera—a process the artist compares to drawing, with the dancer’s body standing in for his pen. The result is less documentary than a composition built from movement itself.
Stripped of music and staged in a bare, almost clinical space, Untitled removes vogue from the noise, crowd, and competition of the ballroom floor. What remains is the dance alone—its rhythm, its precision, its formal beauty—offered up for sustained looking. In isolating the form this way, Newsome makes an argument as much as an image: that vogue, long marginalized and dismissed as street or vernacular performance, belongs fully within the histories of dance, cinema, and fine art. The silence sharpens the invitation, asking the viewer to supply the beat, and with it, a kind of intimacy with a dancer moving, seemingly, for no one and everyone at once.
Untitled was made alongside its companion piece, Untitled (New Way) (2009), and the two works together offer an early statement of the concerns—collage, embodiment, the reclamation of Black and queer cultural forms—that would come to define Newsome’s practice.
The Museum’s Video Art Series is made possible by the generosity of Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz.