Join us for an introduction to the exhibitions currently on view, Pidgeon Audio Visual: Architects Speak for Themselves and Barbara Stauffacher Solomon: Exits Exist, led by Graham Foundation staff.

Walkthroughs run from 2:00–2:30 on the following dates: 
Saturday, Feb 4
Saturday, Feb 11
Saturday, Feb 18
Saturday, Feb 25

Group tours are available by request, contact us at info@grahamfoundation.org

For more information on the exhibition, Pidgeon Audio Visual: Architects Speak for Themselves, click here.

Visit the galleries during the winter bookshop sale in the final week of our current exhibitions, Pidgeon Audio Visual: Architects Speak for Themselves and Barbara Stauffacher Solomon: Exits Exist. All purchases in the bookshop will be 15% off with additional markdowns on select titles.

For gallery hours and timed-entry reservations, click here to book on tock.com/grahamfoundation

Visitor Guidelines
Please note: The audio component of the Pidgeon Audio Visual installation is only accessible to stream in the galleries through the exhibition's dedicated website on a mobile device. The use of a personal mobile device is encouraged and headphones are required. Headphones and chargers are available for use as needed.

The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please call ahead to make arrangements. The second-floor galleries and the third-floor ballroom, where events are held, are only accessible by stairs.

Group tours available by request

Join us for a discussion and presentation of deposition, a project by Marissa Lee Benedict, Daniel de Paula, and David Rueter centered on the displacement, exhibition, and reprogramming of a large-scale trading pit, salvaged from the grain room of the Chicago Board of Trade. In 2021, the obsolete seven-tier commodity trading pit floor was relocated to the center of Oscar Niemeyer’s Ciccillo Matarazzo for the 2021 São Paulo Biennial with support from a grant from the Graham Foundation.  Benedict, de Paula, and Rueter will be joined by Karsten Lund, editor of their new book from Mousse Publishing that documents the project. Copies will be available for purchase in the Graham Foundation bookshop following the discussion.

About the publication:
Proceeding from the iconic installation deposition (2018–ongoing) by artists Marissa Lee Benedict, Daniel de Paula, and David Rueter in the central atrium of Oscar Niemeyer’s pavilion for the 34th Bienal de São Paulo, this volume traces the salvage, displacement, and exhibition of the last corn commodities futures trading pit from the Chicago Board of Trade. Essays and interviews provide divergent lenses from which to view the work, moving from intimate to distant, scanning over the object, the artists, the art institution, and the architectures of the geopolitical landscape in which these elements operate. Section by section, the book works through the multiple, and compacted, meanings of the word “deposition” (geologic, legal, art historical), layering images and texts to build concrete yet non-linear relations, as the 32 fragments of the former trading floor are dragged from Chicago to São Paulo.

deposition (Mousse Publishing, 2023) features the work of Marissa Lee Benedict, David Rueter, Daniel De Paula, and is edited by Karsten Lund with text by Yamila Goldfarb, Cameron Hu, and Ana Teixeira Pinto.

Daniel de Paula is a Brazilian visual artist and researcher. de Paula has been awarded the Mondriaan Funds Proven Talent Award and has exhibited widely at institutions such as MASP, São Paulo; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan; Kunsthal Gent; The Arts Club of Chicago; Estação Pinacoteca, São Paulo; and the 2022 Lyon Biennale. His work is represented by Francesca Minini Gallery and Lumen Travo Gallery, and has been reviewed in Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Flash Art, Mousse Magazine, Folha de São Paulo, and Het Parool. He has participated in several international artistic residencies such as the Jan van Eyck Academie, FLACC, and KIOSKO.

Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter are visual artists, writers, and researchers working in collaboration since 2014. Benedict and Rueter have exhibited works at The US Pavilion for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale; The Arts Club of Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; and Contemporary Art Brussels, amongst others. They have received major grants from institutions such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Their work has been reviewed by publications such as Artforum, Revista, Agenda Magazine, and Hyperallergic. They have collaboratively participated in numerous international artistic residencies including Rupert, the Banff Centre, and the Jan van Eyck Academie.

It was at the Jan van Eyck Academie in 2018 that Benedict, de Paula and Rueter began their collaborative work deposition (2018–ongoing) with the salvage of the last remaining commodities trading pit from the Chicago Board of Trade. Their work has been awarded individual grant support from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and has been exhibited at the 34th Bienal de São Paulo, The Arts Club of Chicago, and The Renaissance Society.

Karsten Lund is curator at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, where he organizes exhibitions, edits publications, and oversees public programs. His most recent exhibitions include new commissions by Haig Aivazian (2021), Jill Magid (2021), Matthew Metzger (2021), and LaToya Ruby Frazier (2019, cocurated with Solveig Øvstebø), as well as group shows such as Nine Lives (2020, with Caroline Picard) and Unthought Environments (2018). His latest group exhibition, Fear of Property (2022), features new work by Benedict, de Paula and Rueter, an off-shoot of deposition (2018-ongoing), and he has acted as editor for a monograph on the work (of the same name) that is being released in 2023 by Mousse Publishing. As an editor, Lund works on three to four books every year at the Renaissance Society, including recent titles by Kevin Beasley and Jill Magid. He has also independently edited volumes such as the Graham Foundation-supported Spells by Irena Haiduk (Sternberg Press, 2015).

Image: Installation view, deposition, 34th Bienal de São Paulo, 2021. Photo: Everton Ballardin

In recent projects Weston Olencki has explored fusions of experimentalism and noise with American traditional music. At the Graham, they premiere new work for pump organ, Sacred Harp hymnody, and electronic synthesis, and offer a vine that grew over the city and no one noticed for electromechanical banjo, magnetic resonators, solenoid motors, AM radio transmitters, handheld radio, railroad spikes, carriage bolts, Markov-driven three-finger banjo picking, and a neural net-generated resynthesis of The Carter Family’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1935) as “performed” by the reanimated and digitized voices of Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Hank Williams, Charley Pride, Elizabeth Cotten, Jimmie Rodgers, Buck Owens, Loretta Lynn, Uncle Dave Macon, and Willie Nelson.

Weston Olencki (b.1992; Spartanburg, South Carolina) is a musician, composer, and sound artist based in Berlin, Germany. Their current work is centered around questions of instrumental music and its contexts and constructs, various mediated practices of listening and improvisation, and the technological, material, and cultural histories of rural space and time.

They have presented work at the Borealis Festival, Issue Project Room, REDCAT, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Ghent Jazz Festival, Philharmonie Luxembourg, Black Mountain College, Musica Nova Helsinki, the American Academy in Rome, Roulette Intermedium, and Frequency Festival, among other festivals and venues. Residencies include CalArts, Columbia, Harvard, NYU, Northwestern, Princeton, Stanford, and the University of Huddersfield. In 2016 they were awarded the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis from the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt. Their recording project Old Time Music (Tripticks Tapes) was named in Bandcamp’s “best of” 2022 music round-up. They have an extensive discography, with upcoming releases on Astral Spirits and Infrequent Seams. Olencki is an active member of Rage Thormbones, the Wet Ink Large Ensemble, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Clone Decay (with Mary Halvorson and Kalia Vandever), the Hollows (with Nick Dunston and Etienne Nillesen), and other projects, and performs regularly as a soloist and ensemble member on low brass instruments, winds, banjo, organs, and various electronic media.

Image: Courtesy the artist

Presented in partnership with Lampo

Lampo, established in 1997, supports artists working in new music, experimental sound and other interdisciplinary practices. The Chicago-based organization's core activity has been and remains its performance series. Rather than making programming decisions around tour schedules, Lampo invites selected artists to create and perform new work, and then the organization provides the space, resources and curatorial support to help them fulfill their vision. Lampo also organizes artist talks, lectures, screenings and workshops, and publishes written and recorded documents related to its series.

Visitor Guidelines: Masks are strongly encouraged. Visitors to the Graham Foundation understand that there is an inherent risk of exposure to COVID-19 in any public space where people are present. When masks are required, they must cover the nose and mouth at all times and meet CDC standards. Disposable masks are available upon request and will be provided to visitors as required.

Accessibility: Events are held in the ballroom on the third floor, which is only accessible by stairs. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.

Through June 10, 2023

Gallery and Bookshop Hours
Wednesday–Saturday, 12–5 p.m.

For gallery hours and timed-entry reservations, click here to book on tock.com/grahamfoundation

Visitor Guidelines
Please note: The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please call ahead to make arrangements. The second-floor galleries and the third-floor ballroom, where events are held, are only accessible by stairs.

Group tours available by request, contact us at info@grahamfoundation.org

For more information on the exhibition, A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing, click here.

Join us for a reception from 4–6 p.m. with artist Katherine Simóne Reynolds to celebrate the opening of her new exhibition A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing.

Katherine Simóne Reynolds practice investigates emotional dialects and psychogeographies of Blackness, and the importance of “anti-excellence.” Her work physicalizes emotions and experiences by constructing pieces that include portrait photography, video works, choreography, sculpture, and installation. Taking cues from the midwestern post-industrial melancholic landscape having grown up in the metro east area of Saint Louis, she formed an obsessive curiosity around the practices of healing as well as around a societal notion of progress spurning from a time of industrial success. Utilizing Black embodiment and affect alongside her own personal narrative as a place of departure has made her question her own navigation of ownership, inclusion, and authenticity within a contemporary gaze. She draws inspiration from Black glamour and beauty while interrogating the notion of “authentic care.” Her practice generally deals in Blackness from her own perspective, and she continuously searches for what it means to produce “Black Work.”

Reynolds has exhibited and performed work within many spaces and institutions including the Pulitzer Arts Foundation; The Museum of Modern Art; and SculptureCenter. She has exhibited in national and international group and solo shows, has spoken at the Contemporary Art Museum of Saint Louis, the Saint Louis Art Museum, and the Black Midwest Initiative Symposium at University of Minnesota. Alongside her visual art practice, she has embarked on curatorial projects at The Luminary; SculptureCenter; and upcoming exhibitions for Stanley Museum of Art as well as Clyfford Still Museum.

For more information on the exhibition, A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing, click here.

3:00pm | Barbara Kasten in conversation with Stephanie Cristello
4:00pm | Book Signing

Join artist Barbara Kasten alongside author and editor Stephanie Cristello for the official book launch of the monograph Barbara Kasten: Architecture & Film (2015–2020), published by Skira. Delving into unearthed comparisons and histories, this conversation contextualizes Kasten’s ongoing investigations into how moving images and perception play within and through architectural forms.

Since the 1970s, Kasten’s nearly five-decade engagement with abstraction and light has developed through the lens of sculpture, painting, theater, textile, and installation. Well-known within photographic and contemporary art discourse, this publication reconsiders the artist through the broader context of architectural theory. Spanning five years of recent installations following the artist’s first major museum survey Barbara Kasten: Stages (2015–16) at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), the Graham Foundation (Chicago), and MOCA Pacific Design Center (Los Angeles), momentous encounters including Kasten’s Crown Hall (2018) installed within architect Mies van der Rohe’s iconic glass and steel structure and her solo exhibition Scenarios (2020–21) at the Aspen Art Museum serve as a primer to her revolutionary methods of abstraction.

Replete with full-color plates, the book features a long-form interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist following significant collaborations on the design of the stage for Obrist’s Interview Marathon (2018) and the film The New Bauhaus (2019) on artist László Moholy-Nagy; curator Humberto Moro’s interwoven comparison to the sensitivities of space, geometry, and color in the buildings of Mexican architect Luis Barragán; how Kasten’s work remains in conversation with new practitioners from architecture critic and curator Mimi Zeiger; and an elective history informed by Kasten’s early cyanotypes of sacred sites and goddess structures that provide a “stage” to disclose the spiritual basis of her approach to light by editor Cristello.

Presented in partnership with Skira

Stephanie Cristello is a contemporary art critic, curator, and author based in Chicago. Her work focuses on artists who critically engage with the image and its role in visual culture. She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013 with a liberal arts thesis in visual critical studies. Cristello was previously the Senior Editor US for ArtSlant (2012–18) and the founding Editor-in-Chief of THE SEEN, Chicago’s International Journal of Contemporary & Modern Art (2013–20). Her writing has been published in ArtReview, BOMB Magazine, Elephant Magazine, Frieze Magazine, Mousse Magazine, OSMOS, and Portable Gray. She has delivered panels at the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale for Architecture, Independent Curators International (ICI), the Terra Foundation for American Art, Manifest Institute, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, and Nordic Talks. Cristello served as the artistic director of EXPO CHICAGO (2013–2020) and is currently the director / curator at Chicago Manual Style (Chicago) and Curator-at-Large at Kasmin (New York). In 2020–21, she was a curatorial advisor to the 2020 Busan Biennale (South Korea) as well as a guest curator at Kunsthal Aarhus (Denmark), the Malmö Art Museum (Sweden), and the Driehaus Museum (Chicago). Cristello has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues nationally and internationally, including monographs on the work of Lap-See Lam (Bonniers Konsthall / Lenz Press, 2021), Mamma Andersson and Tal R (Kunsten Museum / Malmö Art Museum, 2022). She is the author of Theodora Allen: Saturnine (Motto / Kunsthal Aarhus, 2021), Sustainable Societies for the Future (Motto / Malmö Art Museum, 2021), and Barbara Kasten: Architecture and Film 2015–2020 (Skira, 2022). In 2020, she was awarded a publication grant by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Barbara Kasten (b. 1936, Chicago) lives and works in Chicago. She received her BFA from the University of Arizona in 1959 and MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1970. Kasten’s practice centers around an exploration of the nature of perception and materiality. Her photographic output using both studio and natural lighting has been essential to the last decade of multi-disciplinary work in sculpture, video, installation, and public art. These works continue to examine an object’s presence within both illusionistic and real space. Forms--designated by shadow, color, and the space between objects--oscillate between representation and abstraction. Her work has been exhibited across the United States and Europe. Most recently, Kasten was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany, which traveled to Sammlung Goetz, Germany, and is open through April 2023. Other recent exhibitions include Barbara Kasten: Scenarios, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; Women in Abstraction, Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain, and Centre Pompidou, France; The 2020 Busan Biennale: Words at an Exhibition—an exhibition in ten chapters and five poems, South Korea; Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art, TATE Modern, UK; Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE; and a retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia that traveled to the Graham Foundation in Chicago and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work is featured in the collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC among many others.


Barbara Kasten: Architecture & Film (2015–2020) was supported by a Graham Foundation publication grant, click here to learn more.

!Trumpet + Trumpet! That is, two trumpets and two very different approaches—one electronic, the other acoustic. While Collins works with a computer program and cobbled hardware, Ulher uses metal sheets, radios, milk frothers, and other everyday objects. The diametrically opposed sound production leads to oddly similar sonic results. At the Graham, Collins (!Trumpet) and Ulher (Trumpet!) perform together and present solo sound and video work.

Collins explains: “After 40 years, I finally figured out how to program a computer to sound like glitching circuits, and cobbled hardware and software into a brass package: a trumpet with a built-in speaker, sensors reading valve positions, a breath control, and an infrared mute. In a nod to David Tudor’s legendary composition Bandoneon! I’ve dubbed my instrument !trumpet. But where Tudor tags on the ‘!’ to indicate factorial, I lead with it as the symbol for logical negation. This is definitely not a trumpet.”

Presented in partnership with Lampo; Lampo gratefully acknowledges additional support provided by the Goethe-Institut Chicago; Travel support provided by Hamburg Ministry of Culture and Media

Birgit Ulher is a Hamburg-based musician who is focused on extending the sounding possibilities of the trumpet. She has developed various techniques and preparations to produce multiphonics and a grainy, textured sound, whether holding objects in front of the horn’s bell or feeding radio noise into trumpet mutes. Ulher performs solo and in various collaborative settings in festivals and venues around the world, partnering with dancers, visual artists, composers and other free improvisers. Recent projects also include video and sound installations.

Nicolas Collins spent years in Europe, where he was artistic director of STEIM (Amsterdam), and a DAAD composer-in-residence in Berlin. He is a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a research fellow at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent. An early adopter of microcomputers for live performance, Collins also makes use of homemade electronic circuitry and conventional acoustic instruments. His book, Handmade Electronic Music—The Art of Hardware Hacking (Routledge, 2020), now in its third edition, has influenced emerging electronic music worldwide.


Lampo, established in 1997, supports artists working in new music, experimental sound and other interdisciplinary practices. The Chicago-based organization's core activity has been and remains its performance series. Rather than making programming decisions around tour schedules, Lampo invites selected artists to create and perform new work, and then the organization provides the space, resources and curatorial support to help them fulfill their vision. Lampo also organizes artist talks, lectures, screenings and workshops, and publishes written and recorded documents related to its series.

Alicia Olushola Ajayi, Kelley Lemon, and Katherine Simóne Reynolds discuss and explore overlaps and new discoveries in their practices in response to the Reynolds’ Graham Foundation Fellowship exhibition, A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing. As Reynolds centered her focus for this exhibition on the towns Cairo and Brooklyn in southern Illinois, Ajayi’s research on Brooklyn and Black place making in American history, and Lemon’s initiatives exploring connections between Black owned farms and native landscapes across the state of Illinois provide critical context for considering the historic and current conditions—as well as potential futures—of these Midwest communities and landscapes.

Alicia Olushola Ajayi is an architectural designer, researcher, and writer based in New York and holds master’s degrees in architecture, social work, and criticism. She is currently the program developer for BlackSpace Urbanist Collective and is engaged in independent research about antebellum Black settlements.

Kelley Lemon is a registered professional landscape architect, LEED accredited professional, and EDAC certified. She practices both architecture and landscape architecture, with an emphasis in food, productive landscapes, and healthcare and mental/behavioral health environments. Her interests further dive into design and theory of the built environment by researching and uncovering histories and ecological processes, engaging the people of the community, and developing new techniques and strategies to provide a solution that is of the place and vernacular.

Katherine Simóne Reynolds practice investigates emotional dialects and psychogeographies of Blackness, and the importance of “anti-excellence.” Taking cues from the midwestern post-industrial melancholic landscape having grown up in the metro east area of Saint Louis, she formed an obsessive curiosity around the practices of healing as well as around a societal notion of progress spurning from a time of industrial success. Utilizing Black embodiment and affect alongside her own personal narrative as a place of departure has made her question her own navigation of ownership, inclusion, and authenticity within a contemporary gaze. She is the 2022–23 Graham Foundation Fellow.


Image: Alicia Olushola Ajayi, 1903 Regional Map Missouri and Illinois. Courtesy Alicia Olushola Ajayi

For more information on the exhibition, A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing, click here.

Artist Katherine Simóne Reynolds delivers a performative lecture in conjunction with her Graham Foundation Fellowship exhibition, A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing. In the exhibition, Reynolds continues her exploration of overhealing from trauma in a new body of work that includes photographs, a two-channel film, sculptures, and other works. Centered on two towns: Cairo, Illinois, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, and Brooklyn, Illinois—also known as Lovejoy, founded by Priscilla “Mother” Baltimore in 1829 after buying her own freedom, it became the first town incorporated by African Americans in the United States in 1873—the exhibition addresses relationships between perceptions of abandonment and fertility, Black female imagination, and different manifestations of healing as Reynolds looks at the Rust Belt as a kind of keloidal landscape. A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing is on view at the Foundation through June 10, 2023.

Katherine Simóne Reynolds practice investigates emotional dialects and psychogeographies of Blackness, and the importance of “anti-excellence.” Her work physicalizes emotions and experiences by constructing pieces that include portrait photography, video works, choreography, sculpture, and installation. Taking cues from the midwestern post-industrial melancholic landscape having grown up in the metro east area of Saint Louis, she formed an obsessive curiosity around the practices of healing as well as around a societal notion of progress spurning from a time of industrial success. Utilizing Black embodiment and affect alongside her own personal narrative as a place of departure has made her question her own navigation of ownership, inclusion, and authenticity within a contemporary gaze. She draws inspiration from Black glamour and beauty while interrogating the notion of “authentic care.” Her practice generally deals in Blackness from her own perspective, and she continuously searches for what it means to produce “Black Work.”

Reynolds has exhibited and performed at Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and SculptureCenter, Long Island City, NY, among other spaces. Alongside her visual art practice, she has embarked on curatorial projects at SculptureCenter; Stanley Museum of Art, Iowa City; and Clyfford Still Museum, Denver. She is the 2022–23 Graham Foundation Fellow.

For more information on the exhibition, A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing, click here.

Reading from her debut poetry collection, Bittering the Wound—a first-person retelling of the 2014 Ferguson uprising—and other recent works, Jacqui Germain explores and interrogates periods of political rupture, alongside the related histories, revelations, interiorities, anxieties, and generative possibilities in response to Katherine Simóne Reynolds’ Graham Foundation Fellowship exhibition, A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing. Part documentation, part conjuring, Bittering the Wound works to share the narrative of the event with more complexity, audacity, care, and specificity than public media accounts typically allow. Here, Germain’s words echo Reynolds’ work on surveillance, vulnerability, and different manifestations of healing. 

This event will take place within the exhibition in the first-floor galleries and will be followed by a reception. Copies of Bittering the Wound will be available for purchase in the Graham Foundation Bookshop.

Jacqui Germain is a poet and journalist living and working in St. Louis, Missouri. Her debut full-length poetry collection, Bittering the Wound (Autumn House Press, 2022), was selected by Douglas Kearny for the 2021 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics book prize. Germain's poems have been published in The Offing, Poem-A-Day, Muzzle Magazine, The Rumpus, Bettering American Poetry, and elsewhere, in addition to being anthologized in several texts. She has received poetry fellowships from the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission, Jack Jones Literary Arts, and Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. Her chapbook, When the Ghosts Come Ashore, was published in 2016 through Button Poetry and Exploding Pinecone Press. Germain’s journalism, original reporting, political commentary, and feature profiles have been published in The Nation, The Guardian, VICE, Artsy, and more. She served as Teen Vogue's Economic Security Project journalism fellow, reporting for the outlet’s politics section.

For more information on the exhibition, A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing, click here.

Tyondai Braxton premieres Vali, a sprawling set of new electronic and sample-based music for Lampo, built on ideas of space and contrast, stasis and forward motion.

Tyondai Braxton has been writing and performing music under his own name and collaboratively, under various group titles, since the mid-1990s. He is the former front man of experimental rock band Battles. Braxton has composed commissioned pieces for ensembles such as the Bang on a Can All Stars, Alarm Will Sound, Brooklyn Rider, Third Coast Percussion and Yarn/Wire. In 2012, he collaborated with Philip Glass during the ATP I’ll Be Your Mirror festival. He has also performed his orchestral work Central Market with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, London Sinfonietta, BBC Symphony Orchestra, and New York’s Wordless Music Orchestra. In 2013, Braxton premiered the multimedia piece HIVE at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, with subsequent performances at Sacrum Profanum Festival, Krakow; the Barbican, London; and at the Sydney Opera House. His 2022 album Telekinesis is an 87-piece work for electric guitar, orchestra, choir and electronics (Nonesuch). Braxton was recently appointed to Princeton University’s Music Composition faculty as an Assistant Professor of Music.

Presented in partnership with Lampo

Lampo, established in 1997, supports artists working in new music, experimental sound and other interdisciplinary practices. The Chicago-based organization's core activity has been and remains its performance series. Rather than making programming decisions around tour schedules, Lampo invites selected artists to create and perform new work, and then the organization provides the space, resources and curatorial support to help them fulfill their vision. Lampo also organizes artist talks, lectures, screenings and workshops, and publishes written and recorded documents related to its series.

To mark the 25th anniversary of Lampo, Marcus Schmickler has composed new multi-channel music, concerned with spectral transformations of percussion instruments and bells. “Let’s expect the kind of playful electronic music that we crave,” writes Marcus, “deploying technology at the service of creating uncanny sensations.”

Marcus Schmickler is a composer who works at the intersections of computer music and ensemble composition, performance, and research. He is interested in data sonification, or the translation of data into sound, as well as in psychoacoustics and the compositional potential in various auditory illusions, from Shepard tones to ring modulations. His writings about computer music have appeared in MusikTexte, among other publications. His discography consists of over 50 titles, including choir- and chamber music pieces, computer music compositions, electroacoustic works, and his post-rock project Pluramon. Since 2010, Schmickler has taught at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, at CalArts in Valencia, CA, and at the Robert Schumann Hochschule in Düsseldorf, Germany. He currently lives in Rome, as a Villa Massimo Rome Prize Fellow of the German Academy.

Marcus Schmickler has performed several times for Lampo, most recently in February 2018 with Thomas Lehn. His first Lampo performance was in September 2002.

Presented in partnership with Lampo, additional support provided by the Goethe-Institut Chicago

Lampo, established in 1997, supports artists working in new music, experimental sound and other interdisciplinary practices. The Chicago-based organization's core activity has been and remains its performance series. Rather than making programming decisions around tour schedules, Lampo invites selected artists to create and perform new work, and then the organization provides the space, resources and curatorial support to help them fulfill their vision. Lampo also organizes artist talks, lectures, screenings and workshops, and publishes written and recorded documents related to its series.

2 p.m.—Performance
3 p.m.—Closing Reception for A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing

Jared Brown and Regina Martinez present a live score in response to Katherine Simóne Reynolds’ Graham Foundation Fellowship exhibition, A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing.

Jared Brown is an interdisciplinary artist born in Chicago. In past work, Brown broadcasted audio and text based work through the radio (CENTRAL AIR RADIO, 88.5 FM) in live DJ sets and on social media. They consider themselves a data thief, understanding this role from John Akomfrah's description of the data thief as a figure that does not belong to the past or present. As a data thief, Brown makes archeological digs for fragments of Black American subculture, history, and technology. They repurpose these fragments in audio, text, and video to investigate the relationship between history, digital, immaterial space. Brown holds a bachelor’s degree in video from the Maryland Institute College of Art. In 2016, Brown returned to Chicago to make and share work that directly relates to their personal history.

Regina Martinez is a sound centered artist based in Chicago. Her current experiments draw from an archive of infinitely personal recordings she relates to as soundmarks: her father’s hands cleaning dried beans, drumline rehearsal after school, her mother praying the rosary the night before her heart procedure, and the creak of the front gate to home. Each recorded moment becomes its own instrument, its own layer of composition, and a washing and wringing out of memory meant to be overheard like a poem again and again. She grew up in Saint Louis, Missouri where she was artistic director of the Pink House neighborhood art space for creative exchange with children and their families. She is co-creator of “the clothesline” monthly one-night audio-visual installation in St. Louis. More recently she was program manager for Threewalls in Chicago and received a master’s degree in sound arts & industries from Northwestern University.

Photo: Katherine Simóne Reynolds

For more information on the exhibition, A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing, click here.