The Art Newspaper

Theaster Gates: the Listening Room

Until 1 Jul 12

seattle. The history of the Civil Rights Movement is given a voice at the Seattle Art Museum with Theaster Gates’s installation, The Listening Room.

“I wanted to ask questions about the black political voice in Seattle,” says Gates, who was this year awarded the museum’s second biennial Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Fellowship for African-American artists.

The post includes a $10,000 award and the opportunity to exhibit. The installation will feature a collection of vinyl albums from the now closed Dr Wax record store in Chicago to create a space in which visitors can gather to listen and learn about “a cultural archive that was getting lost”, says Gates.

Around 4,000 records, including recordings of Martin Luther King, Jr, James Brown, the Isaac Brothers and vaudeville comedienne “Moms” Mabley, will be embedded in the gallery wall.

Gates says the records can be used to examine African-American politics through history: “When were our voices radical, when were they pacifist? Do we sing about things we can’t scream about?” A DJ will play selections in a pulpit-like station built by Gates from reclaimed materials. “The DJ is the minister of music, the albums are the choir.

He speaks with the voice of history,” says Sandra Jackson-Dumont, the museum’s deputy director of education and adjunct curator of modern and contemporary art, who organised the show.

The installations also features an archival station where the collection will be catalogued and “canonised”. And visitors are encouraged to participate in the project, through listening stations or by holding listening parties as selections may be streamed online. Bringing the project full circle, Jackson-Dumont says she plans to press a record to serve as the exhibition catalogue, with essays read by the writers and musical interludes by Gates. n Helen Stoilas Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)

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