COVER: Terry Adkins / Artforum / March 2014

Terry Adkins, Muffled Drums (detail), 2003-13, eleven found bass drums, mufflers, steel, 30' 3" x 3' 1/2" x 1' 7". 

Event Scores

Terry Adkins and George Lewis in Conversation

It’s still unusual to play an artwork, no matter how many interactive screens or relational games we’ve encountered. But playing the piece is often the first thing that happens in the practices of Terry Adkins and George Lewis – each of whom breached the borders between the visual arts and music, and each of whom came of age in the 1970s and ‘80s ferment of post-bop and cyborgs, identity politics and institutional critique. Artforum invited the vanguard, multidisciplinary artist Adkins – whose work features in the Whitney Biennial in New York this month – to talk with renowned composer and computer-music pioneer Lewis about performance, improvisation, history, race, and sensation. Tragically, Adkins passed away, at the age of sixty, as this issue was going to press. We hope that the conversation that follows might also serve as an unexpected valedictory of sorts, pointing toward the rich possibilities that Adkins’s work has opened up – and will continue to open for years to come.

Quotes from conversation:

“The Mars rover is my model of what I want to make as an interactive artist – an improvising machine that you set down on the surface of a hostile planet, where it makes its own way.”  

-- George Lewis

“I try to make sculpture that is as ephemeral and transient as music is.”

--Terry Adkins

“What your practice shows is the extent to which sound is abstract, functional, and socially embedded, all at once. You can see the tradition, and then you can hear it.” 

– George Lewis

“In your work, there’s a certain amount of surrender and a certain amount of anonymity: the will to let go, the will to allow possibilities to somehow take care of themselves, a kind of anonymous authorship where you just supply the matrix for possibility and remove yourself.”

--Terry Adkins

Click here to order a copy of the March 2014 issue of Artforum.

ANCHORAGE: Terry Adkins

Terry Adkins, Ulukuk, 2011.From the series “Nutjuitok (Polar Star), After Matthew Henson 1866“. Image via db-artmag.com.

Nutjuitok (Polar Star)

April 4 – September 14, 2014

ANCHORAGE MUSEUM

625 C Street

Anchorage, AK

Terry Adkins was on a quest to right historical wrongs. In the new solo exhibition, Nutjuitok (Polar Star), multimedia installations examine Northern exploration and exploitation through the story of Matthew Henson.

Henson was an African American explorer and associate of Robert Peary on various expeditions, the most famous being the race to the North Pole.

In 1909, Peary mounted his eighth attempt to reach the geographic North Pole. He was suffering from frostbite, and sent Henson ahead as a scout. Henson later testified, “I could see that my footprints were the first at the spot.”

Although Peary received many honors, Henson spent the next 30 years working in obscurity as a customs clerk.

Adkins re-examined this story by undertaking his own Northern expedition: During a 2011 artist residency at the Anchorage Museum he traveled to the Arctic Circle and researched Henson’s immersion in Inuit culture.

Adkins learned Henson traded with Inuit people, learned the language, built sleds and trained dog teams. Henson also fathered a half-Inuit son, whose descendants still live in Greenland.

In discussing the North Pole journey and the dispute around who arrived first, Adkins’ artwork broaches a larger conversation about the legacy of exploration and its impact on indigenous people.

Adkins was known for melding sculpture, music, video, literature and ritual to preserve the legacies of his subjects, who in the past have included Sojourner Truth and Ralph Ellison.

Adkins’ work is in the permanent collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. He was an art professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. 

YouTube: Terry Adkins, from the series Nutjuitok (Polar Star)

Exhibit Link

TRANSITION: Terry Adkins (1953 - 2014)

Terry Adkins photgraphed by Luca Nostri. Image via upenn.edu.

From Salon 94 e-blast dated February 8,2014:

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

We are saddened to announce the untimely death of artist and friend, Terry Adkins.

Terry was an intrepid and accomplished artist, performer, musician, and educator who approached his life and work with enormous spirit, audacity, humor, and indefatigable intellect. He was a beloved professor of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, whose influence will be felt by younger artists for years to come. He died suddenly in his home on Fri​day night from heart failure. He was 60 years old.

Born in 1953, Terry graduated from Fisk University in 1975 with a BS, from Illinois State University in 1977 with a MS, and received his MFA from University of Kentucky in 1979. His approach to art making has always been like a composer, demarcating moments for silence, sound, and rhythm.  “Color and surface texture impart voice and character,” he wrote in 1990, along with form, they generate “harmonic resonances which can be absorbed as well as merely seen… The language of [my] work is esoteric, symbolic, abstract.”

Known for his instruments including a variety of immense horns, Terry frequently performed with his long-time band The Lone Wolf Recital Corps. His most recent performances profoundly moved New York City audiences both at The Studio Museum in Harlem and as part of Performa 13. Applying the improvisational and recycling nature of jazz to his exhibitions and sculptural series, Terry has 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’s work is currently included in the exhibition Radical Presence, organized by Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, which traveled to the Grey Art Gallery, New York, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and is going to the Walker Art Center in July. His latest work, three-dimensional representations of bird songs made from cymbals and percussion instruments, will be featured in the Whitney Biennial 2014, on view from M​​arch 7 - M​​​a​y 25, 2014.

Terry has 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). His work is included in the public collections of The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Studio Museum in Harlem, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and most recently, The Tate Collection, London. 

Our heartfelt condolences go out to his wife Merele Williams-Adkins, his son Titus Hamilton Adkins, and his daughter Turiya Hamlet Adkins. We will miss Terry tremendously and mourn the loss of a great artist, performer and enchanter.

With Affection,

Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn | Founder

Alissa Friedman | Partner and Director

Fabienne Stephan | Partner and Director

Terry Adkins, Artist, Musician and Educator Dies, at 60

Fine Arts professor dies of heart failure

Terry Adkins, University of Pennsylvania art professor 

A Memory Jug for Terry Adkins (1953 - 2014) 

Terry Adkins, Composer of Art, Sculptor of Music Dies at 60

On the Death of Terry Adkins  

NEW YORK: Terry Adkins

Nenuphar

October 30, 2013 – January 11, 2014

SALON 94 BOWERY

243 Bowery

New York, NY

SALON 94 FREEMAN

1 Freeman Alley

New York, NY

Salon 94 is delighted to present the work of Terry Adkins in both of the gallery’s downtown locations. Adkins is an interdisciplinary artist and musician known for engaging with historical narratives, often reinventing and reintroducing biographies through installation based experiences called ”recitals”. His approach to art making is similar to that of a composer, and his installations are conceived as scores that punctuate and demarcate space, creating interplay among pieces in different media.

For his first New York gallery solo show in ten years, Adkins presents Nenuphar, a recital that treats the legacies of George Washington Carver (1864-1943) and Yves Klein (1928-1962), focusing on unfamiliar aspects of both men. On the surface, the biographies of Carver and Klein could hardly be more different. Born a slave, American educator Carver rose to such prominence as one of the world’s most revered agricultural chemists and inventors that it has tended to overshadow his artistic advances. He was an award winning painter, musician and creator of numerous pigments, dyes and paints that were extracted from minerals in the soil of Tuskgegee, Alabama. Notable among them is the 1935 Dr. Carver’s Egyptian Blue 9th Oxidation, which matches an ancient hue found only on certain artifacts from the tomb of Tutankhamen and approximates the color and pigment saturation levels of International Klein Blue (IKB). French Nouveau Realist Yves Klein is famous for his color experiments, monochromes, fire paintings, body works, performances and revolutionary ideas and essays. Nonetheless, his early influences from Eastern philosophical and religious doctrines, Japanese culture and Rosicrucian esoterism - traditions that form the foundation of his visionary project - are often downplayed or even denied in an effort to tout his impervious originality. Many of Klein’s innovative concepts can be directly traced to his study of The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception by Max Heindel and Klein’s own Les Fondements du Judo (The Foundations of Judo) 1954, which bears witness to the depth of his involvement with the Japanese belief systems on body and space.

In Nenuphar, Adkins has drawn out and illuminated these lesser-known Carver/Klein particulars, revealing surprising similarities, intersections and common denominators. These include references to botany, agriculture, nautica, religion, music and ancient Egypt that are materially filtered through the sieve of the four elements (earth, fire, air, water). In his sculpture, video and photography Adkins transforms and repurposes a range of found materials, archival imagery and reclaimed actions in a process that he calls “potential disclosure”. The artist aims to reveal the dormant life in inanimate objects, historical facts and figures of thought with the ultimate goal of rendering the material immaterial. For example, in Harvest, irregular spheres of mirrored glass have been hand-blown through the wire teeth of an apple picker—a found farm tool used as a readymade. The gesture of breath into the mouth of the harvesting device instills the rugged tool with handmade minimalist sculpture, and suggests a re-invention of the tool as a collector of “air” and the immaterial. The sculpture also marries Klein’s interests in the Void, the monochrome, minimalism and performance, alongside Carver’s research and promotion of alternative crops to enrich the soil and as a way for farmers to improve their quality of life outside the monoculture of cotton. Modeled after illusory nature of Klein’s 1954 first public gesture Peintures, the folio Progressive Nature Studies reimagines Carver as the creator of a series of large monochrome paintings originating from infinitesimal realm of organic phenomena that he observed through the lens of his microscope. The video wall houses Glorioso, a dual screen 3D projection of wreaths, crosses and floral arrangements that personify Carver, Klein and acts of membership and memorialization.

The raw and abstract sculptures incorporate found and fabricated materials in idiosyncratic ways. Adkins is attracted to articles that are often weighty and weathered—this includes utilitarian and industrial items like leather straps and shipping ropes; historically evocative commodities like textiles and the farm tools, customized musical instruments and equipment that hold the dynamic potential for sound and rhythm. He employs reinvented narratives such as the Carver/Klein story as a way to intensify the original functions of his materials, as well as to disguise them entirely. Engaging in the history of readymade from Marcel Duchamp to assemblage, Arte Povera and abject art, his works suggest that reclaimed materials should be recreated. Texture, contrast, tension, color and surface are all part of his theatrical considerations. In the past, Adkins’ recitals have paid homage to the legacies of a number of immortal and enigmatic figures such as Bessie Smith, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Brown, Matthew Henson, John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Ludwig van Beethoven, Jean Toomer, and Sojourner Truth, among others. Adkins’ immersive research not only intends to resuscitate his chosen subjects from historical erasure, but also to shed light on willfully neglected or lesser-known aspects of their biographies.

For decades Adkins has been known for his modified instruments, including immense eighteen-foot tall horns called Akrhaphones-installed as sculpture and activated in front of an audience through performance. Born in 1953, Adkins grew up deeply invested in visual art, music and language. He emerged in the mid-80’s in his native Washington D.C., where he began making installations and reconstructing instruments to accompany his simultaneous practice as a musician. Playing woodwinds, contrabass, and electronics, Adkins started out as a charter member of Harmolodica with fellow saxophonist Yahya Abdul-Majid, played in Don Cherry’s Community Orchestra, and collaborated with performance artist Sherman Fleming’s AFRO (Anti Formalist Reclamation Organization). During a yearlong residency in Zurich in 1986, Adkins and his cohort Blanche Bruce founded The Lone Wolf Recital Corps, a multimedia performance collaborative of rotating members that continues to stage emblematic concert performances. Activating his sculptures with sound, Adkins engages and re- enacts the revised stories he assigns to history.

This is the artist’s first exhibition at Salon 94. Adkins has exhibited his work widely since his first show in 1980 in Washington, D.C. His work is included in the public collections of The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Studio Museum in Harlem, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Most recently, Adkins’ work Muffled Drums (Darkwater) was acquired by the Tate Modern, made possible by the Outset/Frieze Art Fair Fund. In the spring of 2014 Prestel will publish Recital, Adkins’s first career-spanning volume surveying three decades of his multimedia installations and performances with contributions from Anthony Elms, Okwui Enwezor, Cheryl Finley, Charles Gaines and George E. Lewis.

Exhibit Link

POST: Terry Adkins Imagines 'Black Beethoven'

Photos: (1) Terry Adkins, Darkwater Record (from Darkwater), 2003-08, Porcelain, Cassette tape recorders with “Socialism and the American Negro” speech by W. E. B. Du Bois.; (2) Off Minor; (3) Installation view, Terry Adkins: Recital, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, 2012. Images via Chicagomag.com.

The multimedia artist’s new Block Museum exhibit ponders gaps in our memory of history

Text | Jason Foumberg

Chicago Magazine | February 2013

Was Beethoven black? Anecdotes about the German composer’s “dark” skin, and an apocryphal genealogy from the 1940s that traced him to the Moors, have kept this myth buzzing into this century. And it has prompted the multimedia artist Terry Adkins, 59, a professor of fine arts at the University of Pennsylvania, to create a group of sound sculptures called Black Beethoven, now on exhibition through March 24 at Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art.

Inspired by Adkins’s “forward-looking visions” of American civil rights leaders, martyrs, and musicians, the show succeeds because it makes the viewer wonder, can you see—or hear—a person’s race through his or her art? For those willing to consider the intriguing possibility, the exhibition is worth the short trip to Northwestern’s art museum.

The cornerstone of the entire collection is Off Minor, a music box–like instrument that Adkins invented and normally uses in live concerts. But Off Minor will sit mute during the exhibition; visitors will have to imagine what kind of strangely beautiful sounds it may make—the way Beethoven had to use his imagination as he continued to write music while going deaf. This gap of sensual experience provokes the questions: How do we know the truth about Beethoven’s race unless someone tells us? Can we hear blackness in his works?

Adkins’s strategy mirrors Toni Morrison’s effort to label Bill Clinton as the first black president: It’s thoughtful fiction intended to challenge perception. “I believe in the power of creative imagination above all things,” says Adkins, who, for more than 30 years, has channeled past revolutionaries across politics, art, and music to create his abstract pieces (Jimi Hendrix, blues singer Bessie Smith, and the abolitionist John Brown are among his inspirations). He chooses historical characters “based on their unheralded relevance to today,” he says, “applying their vision to today’s ills and injustices.”

One example: Darkwater Record, named for W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1920 autobiography, is a collection of tape recorders—sans speakers—silently playing Du Bois’s 1960 speech based on his essay “Socialism and the American Negro.” A bust of Mao sits atop them, recalling the Chinese dictator’s co-opting of Du Bois’s socialism. (Mao declared Du Bois’s birthday a national holiday in China.)

As for Beethoven, Adkins says he is intrigued by both the composer’s deafness and the debate around his race, but he doesn’t intend to settle the question of Beethoven’s race. “I hope to generate a sense of seeking in the audience,” he says. “You can then fill in the gaps and participate in history in your own way.”

Terry Adkins: Recital runs through March 24, 2013 at Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art in Evanston, IL. For info, blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.

This article appears under the title "Mind the Gaps" in the February 2013 issue of Chicago magazine