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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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