Lewis Watts and Hugh Livingston
Opening: September 4th, 2011 at 6 pm
Date: September 4th – October 1st, 2011
Evidence
Lewis Watts is interested in responding visually to the evidence of culture, history and contemporary experience in African American communities.
Hugh Livingston creates public sound environments and performs exploratory cello music.
Evidence
Lewis Watts is interested in responding visually to the evidence of culture, history and contemporary experience in African American communities. He has used photography to confirm things he knows about the cultural landscape and also to raise questions. This investigation has been the basis of his photographic and archival endeavors. This work includes imagery from Oakland California, New Orleans, Louisiana and Harlem, New York, communities with strong cultural and historical legacies that are reflected in landscape and people who live and work there.
Lewis Watts is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he has functioned as a photographer, curator, and visual archivist for the past thirty years. Much of his research is an examination of the cultural landscape in rural and urban African American communities and the visual traces of the migration between the two. His photography and archival work has been exhibited, published and collected widely. He is co-author of Harlem of the West, The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era, published in 2006 by Chronicle Books, which traces the history of the cultural life of the Fillmore District from 1941–1968 using found photographs and oral histories from this thriving African-American community that was destroyed by urban renewal.
He has curated exhibits from the Fillmore Archive in various venues including the SF Museum of Performing Arts and Design and Museum, The Jazz Heritage Museum, and the California African American Museum in Los Angeles. He has been working on long term photography projects in West Oakland, New Orleans, Harlem, and Richmond, California. There is a pending publication of New Orleans Suite by University of California Press. His photographic work has been exhibited internationally and is in the collections of The Oakland Museum of California, The Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase NY, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans among others places.
River Text
Projected video animation by Hugh Livingston.
The profile of the local watersheds is portrayed through cascading streams of words that describe the river and its environment, social context, economics, geography, science, and ecology. The computer software takes verbiage in real-time and swirls it through the riffles and whitewater of the descending river.
Hugh Livingston creates public sound environments and performs exploratory cello music. Hugh graduated cum laude in music from Yale University and in 1990 received the Bach Society Prize for excellence in musicianship and contribution to musical life at Yale. He has an MFA in contemporary music from the California Institute of the Arts and a doctorate from UC San Diego. Hugh composes situational music: responses to spaces, artists, architecture and design, history, and people. His special areas of interest are: spatialization, transit-related music, improvisation, collaboration with visual artists, electroacoustic music, and Asian music. Hugh is the founder of The ARTSHIP Recordings, a catalog of 54 improvised solos recorded on a 491-foot Art Deco cruiseliner. He has catalogued 120 different pizzicato techniques for the cello and conducted extensive research in China on contemporary and historical music. His first sound installation, LISTEN EDGEMAR, was created for a Frank Gehry-designed building in Santa Monica. Hugh fabricates unique sculptural speakers for gardens, and develops sonic solutions to combat traffic noise. His music is built around the theme of ‛audio in the public interest‛. His work is supported internationally by the Telluride Institute, the Creative Work Fund, the Asian Cultural Council, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, and the American Composers Forum.
Hugh is working in collaboration with Russian Riverkeeper to produce three projects about the River in 2010–2011. A gallery exhibition of sound and video installations, Catch and Release opens June 25th at Slaughterhouse Space in Healdsburg. Sound & Place, a permanent sound garden, opens June 26th at the Sonoma County Museum in Santa Rosa. A river opera, High Mountains and Long Water, premieres April 2012 at the Chalk Hill Artists Residency, Warnecke Ranch & Vineyards, Healdsburg.
Hugh Livingston Cello Performance at the opening
Photogallery from the opening
