3 Sessions on-site

Tuesdays, December 14, January 11, February 8
4 pm

$20 Members | $40 Non-members per session

Limited availability. Pre-registration is required.

December 14 – Session I: The Music of Time

Musicians “keep time,” accelerate it, slow it, suspend it entirely. At the keyboard and in the galleries (especially our walk-in gamelan) we explore rhythm in Bearden, Matisse, Gris, Kandinsky, Miles Davis, Bartok, Vivaldi and the theme of time in T.S. Eliot’s poetry.

January 11 – Session II: The Art of the Fugue: Bach, Escher, Dehner

When artists turn to compositional strategies involving series, they approach the formal clarity and complexity of the fugue. Using the examples from the show of artists who literally put Bach’s fugues on the wall (M.C. Escher, Joan Snyder, Dorothy Dehner and others) as well as dance and literature (Balanchine, Joyce), we pursue the theme through its many transformations in art and music.

February 8 – Session III: The Sounds of Silence

From the loudest of instruments (Paganini’s cannon, Hendrix’s guitar) the exhibition progresses, diminuendo, to the tightly connected works of John Cage, Idris Khan, David Hockney, Robert Wilson and Christine Sun Kim’s metronome-like marks ticking along the measured margins how it feels to wait in “real-time silence.” As with the study of Beethoven’s late career (we will read the Heiligenstadt Testament), the foundation of these relationships is the experience or image of music for those who are deaf.