Echoes Research Committee:
E. Jane and bell hooks

What artists say in public—about their life, context, references and readings of their work —has always been of great significance in scholarly interpretation and art history. An artist talk developed into a format in itself as a glimpse into the intimacy of the creative process. However, articulating one’s own work is not an easy task. For some artists, the “explanation” may dismiss the work, whereas for others, it becomes part of it.

Skowhegan’s Lecture Archive contains hundreds of lectures dating back to 1946, when the School was founded. Artists, poets, philosophers, journalists, curators, architects, choreographers, and thinkers of all kinds generously share with the School’s participants–offering their words as material alongside their practice. This scenario is repeated year after year as a means of transmission and learning. Lecturer’s words land with each audience member, disperse back into participant’s studios and collective projects, and then drift out into the world after summer. 

Echoes Research Committee is a new public program series at Skowhegan NYC, in which we seek to continue this tradition of learning and listening together, revisiting and growing the dispersal of Skowhegan voices, and welcoming new ears into a broader community.  We invite an artist to select a lecture from the archival recordings and “perform” it anew, creating a reverberation for the audience. 

These performances are a sensitive act. The gentle gesture of a hand, the crinkle of a face, the intonation of a voice amidst the original surroundings—an individual’s subjectivities fade as quickly as they appear during the original utterance of a text. A recording offers the chance for these traces to shapeshift in the minds of new listeners as a special gift of knowledge to the ears of those who listen. To inaugurate this program, E. Jane will join us and create new gestures, intonations, and subjectivities from the sounds of bell hooks’s 1993 Visiting Faculty Lecture.

This series is developed in collaboration with Bryson Rand, member of Skowhegan’s Alumni Alliance.