Encounters, Glimmers, Expansion 🌻
updates from 2024
Dear all,
Happy summer to you.
I wanted to start this newsletter with a note of gratitude and grief for my late mentor and friend Georgiana Pickett. She was a fierce advocate for artists and activists and the ways we conspire to build meaning and worlds together. At her memorial, I had the honor of witnessing the great many lives she has impacted, in addition to mine. What she brought to my artistic practice was the courage to be powerful and different without apology.
Thank you, Georgiana. I will miss your presence, your vision, and your wonderful sense of humor.
Encounters (podcast)
I’ve had the pleasure of being the Denning Visiting Artist at Stanford in the ‘23-24 academic year. Stanford Arts developed a podcast about my residency, diving into how art catalyzes cross-disciplinary play—from the physics and metaphors of the interstellar medium to how information theory connects to mythology from the ancient past.
Encounters podcast guests include Ellen Oh (Director of Interdisciplinary Arts Programs at Stanford Arts), Srinija Srinivasan (Former Vice Chair of the Stanford Board of Trustees and Board Member of the On Being Project), Susan Clark (Assistant Professor of Physics at Stanford and KIPAC Senior Member), Tsachy Weissman (Professor of Electrical Engineering and Founding Director of the Stanford Compression Forum), and Natalie Gosnell (Associate Professor of Physics at Colorado College). Click here to listen to the episodes released so far.
The Gift at Stanford — presenting & expanding
The Gift was installed at Stanford Memorial Church on May 1st in grand fashion. A smaller installation lingered in the church through end of spring term. The installation was accompanied by a multi-disciplinary seminar, “Glimmer and Consequence”, with scholars Christian Gonzales-Ho (Art History), Susan Clark (Astrophysics), Karl Lorenz (Medicine), and Thomas Mullaney (History) refracting the work through their respective disciplinary vantage points.
While at Stanford, I’ve also been building collaborations with faculty in the School of Medicine to study the impacts of The Gift as a therapeutic tool for patients and caregivers grappling with loss. I’ll share more as this research develops.
Interstellar Dust, Plants, Play
As artist-in-residence in the Clark Group at Stanford’s Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, I’ve been diving into the wonders of the interstellar medium. As part of our early artistic development process, we took a field trip to the Stanford Farm to build games that ask creative questions about cosmic dust.
A Summer of Books
This summer, my colleague Natalie Gosnell and I have been hard at work on our manuscript Undisciplined: Radical Strategies for Growing Artist-Scientist Collaborations, which is forthcoming from University of California Press in 2027. Undisciplined is a practical and visionary guidebook for artist-scientist teams who seek to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries, create novel works grounded in shared values and common purpose, and expand the impact of those works with intention and ambition. I’m happy to share we received a books grant from the Sloan Foundation to support this project.
I also put finishing touches on my novel Harold and Okno, a story of an extraordinary friendship entangled with death, outer space, and the Pacific Ocean.
Residency in Green Mountain Falls
Late this summer, I’ll be at Greenbox Arts with my composer-collaborator Sultana Isham. We’ll be doing developmental work on Rogue Objects, an operatic, immersive work I am directing for planetaria that uplifts brown dwarf astrophysics and invites audiences to approach darkness with curiosity and humility, without fear.
Awards, Fellowships, Upcoming
I’m honored to have received the Artist Trust Award this year for my work in performing arts innovation.
My composer-collaborator Sultana Isham received a Discovery Grant from Opera America for our project Rogue Objects.
I’ve been named a Lenore Tawney Fellow at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center for the year 2025, where I’ll be creating work in conversation with the museum’s Tawney collection.
Since last fall, I’ve been mentoring emerging artists through both the MAP Fund SPA program and New Inc.
The Gift will be presented in Los Angeles in partnership with the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time — first at Mt. Wilson Observatory on September 27, 2024 and then at the Music Center campus on February 8, 2025. Many more showings of The Gift are scheduled for the ‘24-25 year; I’ll share them as they near.