Artist Awol Erizku and Music Academy Fellows

It has long been part of the Renaissance salons and Waldorf art schools to pair art and music as a cultural learning experience. On Sunday, July 23, the galleries at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) were abuzz with guests set to do just that, to meet multidisciplinary artist Awol Erizku (Ethopian, b. 1988), view his works, and listen to a concert by the Music Academy (MA) Fellows. 

The event titled Radiant Frequencies was the first in a series at the SBMA called “Beyond Conversation,” and was framed as “a commitment to acquiring and engaging with the most challenging art of our time.”Here we find the museum’s acquisitions of Erizku’s Amanda Gorman and his gold mirrored mosaic sculpture, Nefertiti – Miles Davis (2022) – acquired with funds provided by Gail Wasserman and the Luria/Budgor Family Foundation, as the inspiration for music selections by nine MA Fellows.

How this came together is from the ponderings of one Kandy Luria-Budgor, who sat with me for a quick interview during the reception. She was very simcha the idea she planted had taken seed and grew. We kibbitzed:

Q. How did this event come about?

A. During Covid I did a master’s degree in Contemporary Art, and completed it in 2022. My thesis was called, “Beyond Conversation to Acquisition,” looking at the relevancy of the art purchased by museums. The canon changed recently because museums want contemporary art. My thesis looked at what is contemporary, and it has a direct dotted line to relevancy. If you want your museum to be inclusive and have a global perspective, you have to look at the definition of what contemporary art is and who is producing it. Today we have artists between 30 to 40 years old who have produced high level art, such as Awol Erizku, whose art is in Hong Kong, London, MET, and Whitney in New York and Los Angeles. We are one of the trailblazers of it with five pieces at SBMA, including his Amanda Gorman photograph, one of five produced. The portrait is of a young woman of color depicted at the highest level of accomplishment. When we hung the photograph, it brought in a much wider swath of people, and children who said it was their favorite. Scott Reed brought his daughter Ruby, then five years old, to the SBMA and asked her to pick her favorite work of art. She selected the Gorman photo, and said, “I want to take a picture in front of the princess,” which Scott did. At home she wanted to draw princesses, and all of them had dark skin. When you have something like this happen, you’ve pushed away boundaries, young people see the new canon of art, and how it can be relevant to our society today.

How did the collab with the Music Academy happen?

When [SBMA] started doing acquisitions during my master’s degree studies, I saw that what we consider to be contemporary art was missing from the museum. 

I wrote about having underwritten [funded] programs that would promote emerging and overlooked artists that rise to the level of high art to fill in those important spaces. James Glisson and I were completely in tandem on that, and we brought in 20 new pieces of contemporary art. 

I’ve also been on the board of the Music Academy for 20 years, where there are also emerging artists of high level. I brought the idea to Scott Reed, who loved it. As this is new thinking, we tried to figure out the best way to do a program and get people excited to come. Jamie Broumas put out an RFP (Request for Proposal) to the incoming fellows for any interest about doing a concert at the SBMA, and 74 fellows (half of the entire group) wanted to do it. It got pared to nine musicians to perform this evening. For the “artist conductor” we thought Awol would be a good start, and he met with the musicians. They pulled music they felt spoke to the SBMA contemporary art, and also did an arrangement to the song “Halo” that Beyonce sang, and so it morphed into more than we thought.

The concert began with introductory statements by SBMA Contemporary Art Curator James Glisson, MA Chief Artistic Officer Jamie Broumas, and Erizku. The nine musicians were Arin Sarkissian, Kara Poling, Besnik Abrashi, Sarah Bobrow, Alessandra Marie Liebmann, Freya Liu, Na Hyun Della Kyun, Molly Prow, and Jiho Seo. The works performed were “The Tuning Meditation” by Pauline Oliveros; “String Quartet No. 1, II. Allegretto Con Moto E Con Malinconia Grotesca” by Schulhoff; “Wind Quintet No. 2, III. Under the Earth and II. In Heaven” by Miguel del Águila; “String Quartet No. 1, III Allegro Giocoso Alla Slovacca” by Schulhoff; “Mayu the Great River” by Inti Figgis-Vizueta; “The Light is the Same” by Reena Esmail; and for the finale, the world premiere of Beyonce’s “Halo” arranged by Noah Luna, originally written by Ryan Tedder.

Following the concert there was a Q&A between Erizku and the musicians, with questions posed by Glisson, Luria-Budgor, and artist Forrest Kirk. The musicians shared that viewing contemporary art was a new experience – seeing art they were not used to and that was unconventional. 

Erizku summed it up, “…we [artists] present things we are not used to and have to think deeper about. For me in my studio, it is about synthesis, bringing worlds and things together, to go to the edge, the outer limits, and see how far we can go.”  

411: www.sbma.net