Freedom of Shadow: A Tribute to Terry Adkins

Join the Poetry Foundation for a performance of Freedom of Shadow: A Tribute to Terry Adkins, an oratorio for solo voice and electronics by Douglas Kearney and Haitian-born experimental musician and sound artist Val Jeanty.

A reception follows the performance.

Performance Preview

Douglas Kearney and Val Jeanty perform "Blanche Bruce Does the Modernism" from the oratorio.

Douglas Kearney’s poems, notes, and drafts relating to Freedom of Shadow: A Tribute to Terry Adkins make up a portfolio in the September issue of Poetry magazine.

Terry Adkins

Born in 1953, Terry Adkins approached art making as a composer, demarcating moments for silence, sound, and rhythm. Known for his instruments including a variety of immense horns, Adkins frequently performed with his long-time band The Lone Wolf Recital Corps. Applying the improvisational and recycling nature of jazz to his exhibitions and sculptural series, he riffed on biographies as a creative framework. His work has recovered and honored such figures as Jimi Hendrix, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Ludwig van Beethoven, Jean Toomer, John Coltrane, John Brown, Sojourner Truth, and most recently George Washington Carver and Yves Klein. Terry Adkins presented solo museum exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art (1995), Sculpture Center, New York (1997), Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (1999), the Bronx-River Art Center (2005), and most recently at the Tang Museum, New York (2012). Adkins died in February 2014.

Douglas Kearney

Poet/performer/librettist Douglas Kearney’s second, full-length collection of poetry, The Black Automaton (Fence Books, 2009), was Catherine Wagner’s selection for the National Poetry Series. Red Hen Press published Kearney’s third collection, Patter, in March 2014. He has received fellowships at Cave Canem, Idyllwild, and others. His work has appeared in a number of journals, including Poetry, nocturnes, Pleiades, Callaloo, Fence, LA Review of Books, The Iowa Review, and The Ninth Letter. His produced operas include Sucktion, Mordake, and Crescent City. Raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family in California’s Santa Clarita Valley. He teaches at CalArts, where he received his MFA in Writing.

Val Jeanty

Val Jeanty is a Haitian electronic music composer, percussionist, and turntablist who evokes the musical esoteric realms of the creative subconscious. She incorporates her African, Hatian musical traditions into the present and beyond, combining acoustics with electronics and the archaic with the postmodern. Her Afroelectronica installations have been showcased at the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Village Vanguard and internationally at SaalFelden Music Festival in Austria, Stanser Musiktage in Switzerland, Jazz à la Villette in France, and the Biennale Di Venezia Museum in Italy.

Exhibition

As a companion piece to the performance, Berlin-based schriftkunstler (writing artist) Drury Brennan takes over the gallery wall to compose ulteriori ombre (further shadows), a massive calligraphic reaction to Kearney’s original text.  This exhibition opens on September 18.

Exhibition & Performance Review

EXHIBITION SLIDESHOW:
(to begin, click on the image)

Drury Brennan working on ulteriori ombre (further shadows) at the Poetry Foundation.
The work is a calligraphic reaction to the libretto “Freedom of Shadow,” in honor of Douglas Kearney, in tribute to Terry Adkins—in conversation with both. It is in part a reverberation of Adkin’s and Kearney’s first one-on-one conversation about their collaboration, in particular the first note Douglas took, which served as mooring: “behavioral feeling of performed ethnicity.”

PERFORMANCE SLIDESHOW:
(to begin, click on the image)

Douglas Kearney and Haitian-born experimental musician and sound artist Val Jeanty wrote and performed Freedom of Shadow, an oratorio for solo voice and electronics. As a companion piece to the performance, Berlin-based shriftkunstler (writing artist) Drury Brennan took over the Poetry Foundation gallery wall to compose ulteriori ombre (further shadows), a massive calligraphic reaction to Kearney’s original text. Nadine Nakanishi and Nick Butcher of Sonnenzimmer, who created the beautiful posters for the event, chatted with Kearney during the reception.
Photographs by Jeffery “Hitch” Hitchens.