Image: Fay Victor by Eva Kapanzade

Presenting a talk, musical performance, and a question and answer session, New York-based sound artist and composer, Fay Victor utilizes music as a vehicle to express thoughts and sounds in a multigenre universe that reflects identity, new music, jazz, blues, house, funk, and free improvisation—recalling references from jazz legend Albert Ayler to the innovative Frank Zappa. In partnership with Chicago-based musician Mike Reed, the two explore message together through jazz.

Fay  Victor,  called  “artistically complete”  by the New  York Times, hones a unique vision for the vocalist's role in jazz and improvised music. Victor’s recorded work has been featured in media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The San Francisco Chronicle, Time Out New York, and The Huffington  Post.  Victor has performed with luminaries such as Randy Weston,  Roswell  Rudd,  Nicole  Mitchell,  Archie  Shepp,  Marc  Ribot, and Tyshawn  Sorey. Performance highlights include those at The  Museum of  Modern  Art  (New York),  Hammer  Museum  (Los Angeles),  Kölner Philharmonie (Germany), De Young Museum  (San Francisco),  Symphony  Space  (New York),  and  Bimhuis  (Netherlands). Victor was the  2017  Herb  Albert/Yaddo  Fellow in  Music  Composition.  Current releases  include  her  album  Wet  Robots (ESP  Disk, July  2018)  with  her  SoundNoiseFUNK  project,   Nicole  Mitchell’s  Maroon  Cloud (FPE Records, August  2018),  and  Marc  Ribot’s upcoming Songs of Resistance (September 2018) featuring Victor as well as guests vocalists Tom Waits, Steve Earle, and Meshell Ndegeocello.

Mike Reed is a musician, composer, bandleader and arts presenter based in Chicago. In addition to leading or co-leading several working bands, all rooted deeply in jazz and improvised music, he’s the current programming chair of the Chicago Jazz Festival, and the owner and director of the acclaimed performing arts venue Constellation.

Image: Fay Victor. Photo: Richard Koek

For more information on the exhibition, Incense Sweaters & Ice, click here.

Montage has been hailed as one of the key structural principles of modernity, yet its importance to the history of modern architecture and urbanism has not been adequately explored. This presentation, derived from the recently-published Graham-funded book by the same title, introduces key concepts that chart the history of montage in late nineteenth-century urban and architectural contexts, its application by the early twentieth-century avant-garde, and its eventual appropriation in the postmodern period. Focusing on a specific case study, the talk demonstrates the centrality of montage in modern explorations of space and in conceiving and representing the contemporary city. After the talk join us for a reception celebrating the publication of Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity, and the Representation of Space (Yale University Press, 2018).

Martino Stierli is The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, a role he assumed in March 2015. Martino oversees the wide-ranging program of special exhibitions, installations, and acquisitions of the Department of Architecture and Design. His exhibition Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 is currently on view at MoMA. In 2016, he cocurated, with Ann Temkin, the exhibition From the Collection: 1960–1969.

Previously, he held a SNSF Professorship at the University of Zürich. Stierli is the author of Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film (Getty Research Institute, 2013) and coeditor of Participation in Art and Architecture (I. B. Tauris, 2016). He is the cocurator of the international traveling exhibition Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. His scholarship has been recognized with a number of prizes and awards, among them the ETH Medal of Distinction and the Theodor Fischer Prize from the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich (2008). In 2012, he was a fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. He holds a PhD from ETH Zürich.

Image: El Lissitzky, Wolkenbügel, 1924-25. Photomontage. Courtesy of the Russian State Archive for Literature and Art, Moscow.

Computer music pioneer Carl Stone performs unreleased recent works, including Don Dae Gam and Sun Nong Dan, named after favorite restaurants, in this special concert for Lampo. Stone studied with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney at CalArts during the early 1970s, and, while still a student, began using appropriated material to generate work. His exploratory techniques led to a body of complex sound collages, widely credited for laying the groundwork for the entire sampling movement, and defining the arc of his singular practice over the decades since. He has proven a prolific and imaginative voice in electronic composition, mashing together notions of high and low culture and recontextualizing diverse ethnographic materials, from Purcell to Spears, into immensely beautiful, time-bending music.

Stone will also present an artist talk at the Lampo Annex on Friday, November 30, click here for more information and to RSVP.

Since 2010 the Graham Foundation has supported and partnered with Lampo to produce this performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a non-profit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects.

Carl Stone (b.1953, Los Angeles, Calif.) has composed electroacoustic music almost exclusively since 1972, and has used computers in live performance since 1986. He was among the vanguard of artists incorporating turntables, early digital samplers, and personal computers into live electronic music composition. An adopter of the Max programming language while it was still in its earliest development at the IRCAM research center, Stone continues to use it as his primary instrument, both solo and in collaboration with other improvisers. He is currently a faculty member at Chukyo University in Japan. Two retrospective volumes of his work, Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties (2016) and Electronic Music from the Eighties and Nineties (2018) are available from Unseen Worlds.

In her Lampo debut, Madalyn Merkey premieres the performance of Digital Concert Creatures, a quadraphonic work for synthetic computer sounds and voice. Here, she sets autonomous sonic characters, or “creatures,” in motion, building sound by layering frequencies. “The main idea is that each letter on the keyboard has a different personality defined by four columns of numbers on the computer screen,” she writes. “Each keystroke catches a snapshot of the ‘creature’ as it moves along a compositional path, which then becomes complicated or influenced by the other keys being pressed.” Through a mix of control and chaos—and informed by mathematics more than traditional musicianship—Merkey’s new work is as playful as it is dense.

Since 2010 the Graham Foundation has supported and partnered with Lampo to produce this performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a non-profit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects.

Madalyn Merkey (b.1988, Oklahoma City, Okla.) is a composer and performer of live computer music based in Oakland, California. Her practice began as a visual artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she transitioned to sound and time-based art in 2010. Her recent work is concerned with using principles of logic to create computer programs that generate distinct sound surprises in a live setting. Merkey is also the English translator of Due scuole di musica elettronica in Italia, a pioneering electronic music text written by Enore Zaffiri in the 1960s. Her translation, Two Schools of Electronic Music, is forthcoming from Die Schachtel. Recordings of Merkey’s work Scent (2012) and Valley Girl (2014) are available on New Images Ltd.

Join us for a talk by Manuel Raeder focusing on the work of his Berlin-based interdisciplinary design office, Studio Manuel Raeder and independent publishing house, BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE. Concerned with the construction of narratives in the form of books, exhibitions, and communication design, the studio works closely with artists and designers to explore how books can be used as experimental devices to document or conceive of ideas, as well as how exhibition design can trigger different sensorial experiences through a spatial experience. Through his interests in the meaning of books in space, the archive, and the future of libraries, Raeder questions how different forms of organizing and categorizing can define or alter history.

Studio Manuel Raeder has collaborated on over 150 artist’s books and has been responsible for the communication strategies and graphic identities of several cultural institutions and galleries including Kölnischer Kunstverein (2007 – 2011), Kunstverein München (2010 – 2015), Para Site Hong Kong (2012 – 2014), Artists Space New York (since 2009), Galerie Neu Berlin (since 2005), Mendes Wood DM São Paulo/Brussels/New York (since 2014), kurimanzutto Mexico City (since 2016), as well as the fashion label BLESS (since 2004).

In 2011, Manuel Raeder founded the publishing house BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE to distribute and publish artists who have a strong interest in exploring the format of the artist’s book. In doing so, the studio has developed longstanding collaborations with artists such as Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Mariana Castillo Deball, Haegue Yang, Nora Schultz, Danh Vo, Heinz Peter Knes, Leonor Antunes, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Eran Schaerf, and Sergej Jensen, amongst others.

In collaboration with Elgarafi, the studio created a temporary shop in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Apart from offering Elgarafi prints, books published by BOM DIA and Muebles Manuel furniture, the space also hosts regular events.Specializing in high quality artist books that are conceived as an integral part of artists projects or as artworks themselves.

BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE — ‘good day, good afternoon, good night’ in Portuguese — conveys the idea that books can become part of everyday life, regardless of the time of day.

Concurrent with this event, the Graham Foundation Bookshop will host a BOM DIA pop-up featuring a selection of recent titles.

Image: Exhibition Architecture by Studio Manuel Raeder for Eduardo Costa, Mental Relations, 2017 at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, photo: Ramiro Chaves

PREVIOUS POSTS NEW POSTS