NEW YORK
The Art of Counterpoint
8 Musicians Make Art
Opening on Thursday, November 10th from 6-8 pm
on view until January 10, 2023
Featuring:
Marion Brown
Bill Dixon
Douglas R. Ewart
Ted Joans
Oliver Lake
Matana Roberts
Cecile McLorin Salvant
Wadada Leo Smith
At Zürcher Gallery, New York
An exhibition catalogue will be available for purchase, $20. The digital edition can be viewed here.
Read J.J. Murphy’s Review here.
The Art of Counterpoint, 8 Musicians Make Art mentioned in the Gothamist.
The Art of Counterpoint, 8 musicians make art brings together music, poetry, visual art history (Marion Brown, Bill Dixon and Ted Joans) and contemporary musicians (Douglas R. Ewart, Oliver Lake, Cecile McLorin Salvant, Matana Roberts, Wadada Leo Smith ). All are accomplished painters and sculptors. In the mid-60’s, some people were approaching music, poetry and visual art in a fluid way. They were reluctant to think of their creative output as limited to a disciplinary category but the raw experiments and artistic pratice of those musicians and poets did not really register clearly as art until they were exhibited in « The Freedom Principle, Experiments in Art and Music 1965 to Now » curated by Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete at the MCA Chicago, a show which coincided with the 50th anniversary of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Early AACM members, Joseph Jarman, Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell were all avid painters dedicated to the fusion of music, performance, poetry and visual arts in a veritable Gesamtkunswerk or total works of art. Musicians collaborated with visual artists. Douglas R. Ewart, a key figure in the AACM group since the 1970’s plays reeds and performs as a band leader but he is also a sculptor. He builds his own percussion instruments (so-called « little instruments » such as chimes, bells and gongs). Another early AACM member, Wadada Leo Smith – like Anthony Braxton- adopted early on the possibilities of graphic scoring and related experiments in musical notation. Unlike Smith’s scores, Matana Roberts’ scores incorporate found imagery, photographs taken during road trips in search of her Southern roots, thereby suggesting a more syncretic current improvised music and remininding us of jazz’s roots. The idiosyncratic art-scores of Wadada Leo Smith or the collages of Matana Roberts « could also be considered in the framework of the AACM’s broader aesthetic ambitions in the realm of visual culture to embed their music within a new, Afro-modernist visual language. » (1)
Douglas R. Ewart, Matana Roberts, and Wadada Leo Smith were shown in The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2015. Douglas R. Ewart has also been shown at the Bergen Kunsthalle, Bergen, Norway (2022) where Matana Roberts' solo exhibition I Call America, was shown in 2017 after it was originally shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2015. Roberts' work has been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017), The Tang Teaching Museum, NY (2017), and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2016). Wadada Leo Smith's work has been shown at the University of Chicago, the Hammer Museum , and the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, and both Smith and Oliver Lake were recipients of the 2022 Vision Festival's Lifetime Achievement Award. Bill Dixon's 1994 lithographs have been exhibited in Paris, New York, Berlin, and Vermont, and they are now in the permanent collection of the Bibliothéque nationale de France. Ted Joans was recently included in Surrealism Beyond Borders at the Met, New York and Tate Modern, London.
In 2001, two years before he passed away, Ted Joans, the trumpeteer, poet, traveller gave the following teducated art tip : »Afro artists create art, we are artists ; everything we create is art ; although we art not that « art » which Caucasoids attempt to impose on our art. We use any ways, or materials that are chosen to create this art ; thus Afroidian attitudes do not do adhere to Caucasoidian academic avant-garde; we be jes art of me ! «
(1) Dieter Roesltraete The Way Ahead, in The Freedom Principle Experiments in Art and Music 1965 to Now