Sun Ra in ‘Space is the Place’ (1974) (still via YouTube)
The artist known as Sun Ra would have turned 100 years old today. In death, as in life, the man born Herman Poole Blount on May 22, 1914 is a forceful enigma, an influence on more than a generation of musicians, thinkers, and artists. Just this year in New York, two museum exhibitions have made reference to his work and legacy: The Shadows Took Shape, at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Report on the Construction of a Spaceship Module, at the New Museum. But Le Sony’r Ra, as he was legally named, was also a major influence on music, with his contributions to the field of experimental jazz recently surveyed by National Public Radio, which also aired an hour-long show devoted to his music last Sunday.
Much of Sun Ra’s output is now easily accessible, with his best-known film, Space is the Place (1974), available in full on YouTube (embedded below), and large portions of his extensive discography have been digitized: earlier this week, the Sun Ra Music Archive announced the release of 21 remastered albums on iTunes. Recordings of some of his lectures and recitations related to his writings are included in the 700-tape Sun Ra/El Saturn Collection at the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago.
As part of Hyperallergic’s Emily Hall Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators, Sadaf Padder presents an exhibition to offer insight into her curatorial process.
The two-part exhibition features the work of 41 graduating artists across disciplines, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, and integrated practices.
Through small-scale works, this exhibition at the Katonah Museum of Art in New York examines Cornell’s prominent role in the lives and careers of Johnson and Kusama.
There must be a lesson in Vasilis Katsoupis’s film Inside about the vacuousness of the art market or the claustrophobia of exhibition spaces — I just don’t care.
http://davidnolangallery.com/exhibitions/