What drives cultural practitioners to experiment, discover, and create?
In conjunction with the Center’s celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Pew Fellowships in the Arts in 2017, we spoke to electronic musician and DJ King Britt (2007) whose work explores the musical possibilities that arise at the intersection of club, experimental, and electronic music.
We spoke to Sharon Hayes (2016) who employs various mediums—including video, performance, installation, and photography. Hayes’ work is concerned with interrogating the present political moment, often through works staged “in the street,” a practice that she says arose from her “interest in public speech and the conditions of public address.”
We spoke to artist and filmmaker Mark Kendall(2016), whose experimental documentary films reflect on, as he says, “the everyday conditions of our everyday lives” in ways that bring together the physical, sensuous and perceptual with the intellectual.
We spoke to visual artist Annabeth Rosen (1992), who creates elaborate sculptures of clay that are “volcanic, beastly, catastrophic, and unnervingly funny,” as described by writer and critic Nancy Princenthal.
We spoke to Lela Aisha Jones (2016) who intertwines personal history, social commentary, and interdisciplinary methods, drawing from, in her x, “the individual and collective lived experiences of blackness.”
We spoke to visual artist Eileen Neff (1994), who conflates physical and photographic space in artworks that challenge the ways in which photography mediates perception.
We spoke to theater artist Jennifer Kidwell (2016), whose poignant, performer-driven theater work addresses the complexities of race and notions of American history with sharp intelligence and wry humor.
We spoke to Matthew Levy (2016) whose performance practice and compositions combine modern classical music with the rhythmic and improvisatory aspects of jazz, guided by his dedication to exploring the saxophone’s genre-defying capabilities.
We spoke to composer Andrea Clearfield (2016), who creates deep, emotive musical languages that she says, “synthesize disparate elements into a musical whole” and “build cultural and artistic bridges.”
We spoke to Ryan Eckes (2016), whose narrative-driven poetry is, in his words, “a possible form of history:” a way to document the voices and conditions of urban life.