Cane’s Knife, Mixed Media Installation, 5’ x 5’, 2025
Cane’s Knife, Mixed Media Installation, 5’ x 5’, 2025
MFA, 2nd Year
Aambr Newsome is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans performance, public art, installation, and printmaking, with a central focus on materiality as a gateway to ancestral memory. They investigate the histories embedded in materials tied to the transatlantic slave trade—sugar, cotton, and other crops cultivated through forced labor—exploring their cultural, spiritual, and historical resonance. By engaging with these materials, the artist seeks to unearth the stories and memories they carry, asking: What do our ancestors want to say? What does the land demand of us?
Their process unfolds in the stillness of late-night hours, where they connect with their higher self, becoming a vessel for the messages embedded within these substances. Through sculpture, performance, and site-specific installations, they interrogate labor, exploitation, and the body’s relationship to material goods that once defined entire economies and continue to shape our collective memory. By working with sugar crystals, raw cotton, and other remnants of the plantation economy, they create spaces to honor those who labored, suffered, and resisted.
This material exploration is a spiritual practice as much as it is a creative one. They blend African and Indigenous traditions with Afrofuturist narratives, forging connections between the past and the future. These works seek to reclaim the legacies stolen through enslavement, offering new ways to understand identity, spirituality, and ritual. By working with the very materials that sustained oppressive systems, they aim to shift narratives of race, gender, and value toward liberation and transformation.
In addition to their material focus, their broader body of work addresses systemic inequities like homelessness, economic justice, and the ongoing impact of colonialism. Their current emphasis on installation-performance art invites viewers to confront the weight of history while imagining new futures, guided by the belief that art is one of our most powerful tools for social change. Through their practice, they aspire to unlock the ancestral memory of materials, creating spaces for reclamation, healing, and resistance.
performance, installation, short film, 2024
Beyond the Veil
12’x 12’x 12’
Mixed Media
2025
Beyond the Veil is a mixed media based installation that speaks to the relationship between the physical and ancestral realm. The artist utilizes this piece as a sacred tool for shadow work between the spirit world and the present.
By inviting the ancestors into the gallery, we allow them to be our collaborators in co-curating a sacred space. This acts as a metaphysical offering, allowing them to express themselves by manifesting alive into the work.
The audience also acts as a collaborator, as the work is made from sugar melting more with each person's body heat and breathwork. This makes each viewer implicit in the quiet destruction of these performing sculptures.
Aambr Newsome is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores labor, the body, ancestral memory, and healing through creative spiritual intervention. Born and raised in Sacramento with family roots in Mississippi, Aambr has lived in Oakland for over 15 years, a place that has profoundly shaped their artistic practice.
Working across printmaking, painting, assemblage, sculpture, and performance art, their practice is rooted in deconstructing capitalism, white supremacy, and systemic inequities while honoring Indigenous and African rituals. By engaging with materials like wood, sugar, and cotton—each tied to Black ancestry and spirituality—they seek to uncover the complex conversations between the spiritual and physical realms.
Influenced by their Choctaw heritage and their time in Ghana reconnecting with Igbo and Orisha spiritual practices, Aambr combines found objects, drawn elements, and casted body parts to interrogate the relationship between labor and the body. Their current series of casted and relief sculptures is designed to self-destruct over time, rejecting audience ownership and reflecting their punk rock ethos.
A former Black Bay Area Fellow at Root Division in San Francisco, Aambr exhibited work in GLAMFA 2025. Through their work, they aim to illuminate how systemic inequities tied to labor fragment the body and perpetuate inherited trauma, while also offering pathways for collective healing and spiritual reclamation.
The Chosen One
Sugar and Twine
13’ x 5’
2025
An Excerpt from Cathedral.
This work reconsiders and criticizes the construct of religion as a tool of the oppressor. Biblically there has always been a declaration that God has a “chosen people” and that those people will often find themselves crucified and persecuted by society throughout time.
Historically Black people have been overwhelmingly persecuted across the globe for the color of their skin, especially the Black Man.
This work allows for those who have been persecuted at the hands of White Supremacy, Police Brutality, and Slavery to be called into the present moment through the activation of sugar as an ancestral crop.
The material melts slowly over time, allowing for spirit to embody these objects, release their trauma, and rebirth back into the ancestral realm.