Salome Asega grew up surrounded by spectacle. Her after-school rituals included accompanying her dad to his job as a floor manager at the Las Vegas MGM Grand Garden Arena. She’d survey the venue’s transformation into a concert stage for Janet Jackson or a freestyle racetrack for Monster Jam, the annual event where monster trucks perform extreme tricks. She was also a regular at the Caesars Palace OmniMax, a spherical theater billed as a “sensational sight and sound adventure.” (One might consider it a predecessor of the Sphere, Las Vegas’s new, $2.3 billion entertainment venue.) “Las Vegas has always been an early adopter and champion for experimenting with new forms of audience engagement,” says Asega.
The same could be said of the artist herself. Asega is part of a league of innovative Black creatives who have carved out robust practices as activist artists. What began decades ago with initiatives like Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses in Houston and Theaster Gates’s cluster of refurbished buildings for art and education on Chicago’s South Side has multiplied over the past 10 years to encompass Mark Bradford’s Art + Practice in South Los Angeles, Wangechi Mutu’s Africa’s Out! nonprofit supporting new African narratives, and Titus Kaphar’s NXTHVN cultural accelerator in New Haven, among many others.
These leaders have leveraged their commercial success to build spaces elevating the work of marginalized artists. At 34, Asega is still in the early stages of her art career. In classic millennial fashion, she has mashed up her creative passions with her love for arts administration to forge a path that pays homage to Lowe’s pursuit of “social sculpture”—art made with and for the community.
After graduating from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study with a focus on social practice, Asega attended Parsons for an MFA in design and technology, where she soon pivoted to community organizing and art. She landed residencies and fellowships at organizations including the Laundromat Project, Eyebeam, the New Museum’s incubator NEW INC, and the Ford Foundation, while also teaching courses at Parsons. “The classroom is an active place to work through complex, layered challenges without restraint or external pressure,” says Asega. “There’s some level of safety to try things out, fail, try again, and come back. Output isn’t as important as process to me because it’s in developing a process that we can refine and iterate on, asking better questions.”
As her former teaching partner and collaborator American Artist puts it, “Salome has the phenomenal ability to make everyone feel seen, to draw out their unique gifts and make them shine. She can hold space for the hard conversations within her community and is ready to pop a bottle when it’s time to celebrate.”
At NEW INC in 2016, Asega joined POWRPLNT, a space for young people to embrace digital arts. At the Ford Foundation, she honed her skills in supporting artists working at the intersection of radical storytelling, social justice, and new technology. Coming full circle, Asega became NEW INC’s director in 2021 and now helms a cultural incubator centered on professional development and technical assistance.
With her handpicked team of six, she leads a primarily BIPOC and female creative community pursuing weird, wonderful, and impactful projects and businesses. In record time, she has raised millions of dollars, curated programming with diverse partners ranging from EY (Ernst & Young) to the Onassis Foundation, and reimagined NEW INC’s annual Demo Day into a full-fledged festival celebrating members’ ideas put into practice. According to artist Sable Elyse Smith, Asega’s secret sauce is her “egoless enthusiasm for working with creatives that matter and bringing people in a room together to dream.”
For Asega, dreaming and imagining are critical to countering the white male fantasies of Silicon Valley that dominate the public’s perception of progress and innovation. Iyapo Repository, an ongoing project Asega created with artist Ayodamola Okunseinde, illustrates the power of collective imagination: Participants engage in a card game to catalyze cultural and technological artifacts, and their ideas are memorialized in manuscripts, with elements rapidly prototyped through computer-aided drawings.
Some of the drawings are developed into products. Iyapo Repository is an Afrofuturist treasure trove and living museum that concretizes Black futures and makes technology accessible and digestible to a hungry community. “Imagine a world where new technology becomes an access point to our histories and traditions before they are completely lost—where design fosters conversation and provokes us to speculate on the future we want,” says artist and educator Nontsikelelo Mutiti. “This is the world-building of Salome’s making.”
Asega’s latest work, RATs, 2022, is a funny and seething critique of “Risk Assessment Tools,” which aid decision-makers on welfare eligibility, medical benefits, and housing services. The work explores the impact of biased data generated by A.I. through interviews with researchers and artists. The fruits of this labor are embodied in a fabricated monster truck with tires taller than Asega herself, and a tail stretching 23 feet. This sinister spectacle, which has been shown in Toronto and at the Munch Triennale in Oslo, explores the duplicitous nature of technology—something destructive and invasive.
Lowe has famously said that Project Row Houses, which is both an art project and an affordable housing development, was partially inspired by a student he met on a studio visit, who challenged him, “If you’re an artist and your job is to create, then why can’t you create solutions?” Solutions are where Asega’s art begins. Her alchemy is to merge artist, educator, and museum administrator into a single avatar that can navigate both physical and digital spaces. With an uncommon social dexterity, she takes he institution as her artistic medium and sculpts it into a new form, centered on a multiplicity of narratives that challenge the status quo.
NEW INC's open call for Incubator Members is open through March 8. Find more information here.
