I’m honored to celebrate the opening of ‘A Garden In The Flood’; a survey of 20 years of my transmedia works, at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville. Curated by their indefatigable chief curator Mark Scala, the exhibition explores narrative and formal links between shared themes of the garden, (or order) and the flood, (or chaos) in my work over the last twenty years; creatively recombining elements from environmental installations and performances exhibited at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Whitney, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Getty Research Institute, ICA Boston, Mass MoCA, MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology and the Moody Center for the Arts; made with incredible collaborators - like Aranda\Lasch, Daniel Bosia and TBA-21, Artmatr and Sarah Schwettman, Hector Parra and Lisa Randall, Aaron and Bryce Dessner, Shara Nova, Hope Mohr Dance and Evan Ziporyn, as well as a selection of paintings from the last twenty years generously lent by the Brooklyn Museum, SFMoMA and private collections.
The galleries are permeated by a gorgeous newly commissioned soundscape by composer Hanna Benn, which accompanies ‘Telmun’, a new film featuring the Fisk Jubilee Singers, directed by the dearly missed Dr Paul Kwami. Telmun is the centerpiece of ‘The Arguments’, a ten-part film cycle being shown together for the first time, inside an eighty foot long wall drawing.
It took an incredible curatorial team to make such a long, strange, trip seem so lucid - and my deepest thanks go out to Mark, Meagan, Ashley, Scott, Hans, Susan, Seth, Richard, Nicki, Wallace, Danielle, Helen, Brandon and the rest of the team at the Frist.
If you can’t make it to Nashville to see the show, the museum has published a beautiful, comprehensive catalog with insightful essays by Caroline Jones and Mark Scala and a conversation with myself, Hanna and Dr Kwami, designed by Purtill Family Business and distributed by Delmonico/DAP. Finally I’d like to gratefully acknowledge the invaluable participation of Angel Adams, Anais Daly and the Engine for Art, Democracy and Justice, an initiative of Dr Maria Magdalena Campos Pons at Vanderbilt University, in the making of ‘Telmun’ and give profound thanks for the warm welcome by Fisk University and the entire Nashville community.
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