Rashaad Newsome’s art reinforces that the future is Black and queer. The multidisciplinary artist mixes a variety of mediums and artificial intelligence, paired with art history, Blackness and queerness to challenge the status quo. This can be prominently seen in his Sansbury Centre exhibition “In The Absence of Evidence We Create Stories,” via his virtual installation “Self Inventions.” But what has become a calling card for Newsome has been the creation of the social humanoid artificial intelligence named Being. Launched in 2019, Being is an amalgamation of 3D animation, scripted responses, generative grammars, game engines, and machine-learning models that utilize a counter-hegemonic algorithm. The Afrofuturistic artist was a keynote speaker at Gray Area Festival 10 and his work can be observed in The Studio Museum in Harlem, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Museum of the African Diaspora and The Whitney Museum. — J.S.M.