Opens June 23 at SAAM

Musical Thinking: New Video Art and Sonic Strategies
Opens June 23, 2023
Smithsonian American Art Museum (G Street Northwest & 8th St NW)

Explore the intersection of video and music with work by today’s leading artists

Musical Thinking: New Video Art and Sonic Strategies explores the powerful resonances between recent video art and popular music. It celebrates major new acquisitions to SAAM’s media art collection and pairs recently added video works by ADÁL, Raven Chacon, Mariam Ghani, Martine Gutierrez, Arthur Jafa, Erin Ellen Kelly, Christine Sun Kim, Liz Magic Laser, Simone Leigh, and Cauleen Smith with immersive installations and related photographs, sculptures, and prints.

The exhibition focuses on video art that employs the strategies of musical creation — scores, improvisation, and interpretation — as well as its styles, structures, and lyrics to speak to personal as well as shared aspects of American life. Rich with cultural references and emotionally evocative, the works in the exhibition use music to call up memories, capture attention, provoke insight, and invite engagement.

Exhibition Credit:
Musical Thinking: New Video Art and Sonic Strategies is organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Generous support has been provided by Michael Abrams and Sandra Stewart, Aida Alvarez, Candy and Michael Barasch, Carolyn and Mo Cunniffe, Roger S. Firestone Foundation, Ed and Kathy Fries, Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Pamela and David Hornik, Maureen and Gene Kim, Nion McEvoy Publications Endowment, Victoria McManus, V. Joy Simmons, MD, Smithsonian Accessibility Innovation Fund, Lucille and Richard Spagnuolo, Helen and Peter Warwick,and the SJ Weiler Fund.

This exhibition received federal support from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative Pool, administered by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, and the Asian Pacific American Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center.

Image credit:
Cauleen Smith, Sojourner, 2018, digital video, color, sound, 22:41 minutes, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by the SJ Weiler Fund, 2020.54.1, © 2020, Cauleen Smith