‘The Listening Room’ At Seattle Art Museum.

Marcie Sillman
12/15/2011

Art museums are dignified repositories for cultural artifacts, right? A new show at the Seattle Art Museum questions that assumption, and slips in a little R&B at the same time. KUOW’s Marcie Sillman reports.

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It’s a chilly Sunday morning. The Seattle Art Museum, SAM, has been open for an hour or so, but people are just starting to trickle in. Things are pretty quiet until you take the escalator up to the second floor.

Marcie Sillman: “You can hear the music at SAM before you actually get to the gallery.”

Jazz wafts down the hall as enticing as the aroma of freshly–baked cookies. Follow your ears and you’ll find the audio chef: a young woman in a yellow sweater with a set of headphones on top of her red hat.

That’s DJ Ayana Contreras. She’s spinning discs on two turntables built into a wooden cabinet set up in the middle of the gallery.

Contreras: “Sometimes I use the metaphor or these two turntables as pots, and I’m cooking. Come on in, come to the pot and sniff it, and ask me, and I’ll tell you about the bay leaf I just put on.”

Contreras chooses the ingredients for her tuneful stew from a collection of 5,000 long–playing albums (LPs). For those of you too young to remember, music was recorded and pressed into 12–inch vinyl discs in the pre–digital days. The records are filed in a specially–made nook in the art gallery’s back wall.

Theaster Gates: “It’s a kind of canon of black music, you know; that it covers gospel, jazz, blues, disco, early R&B, later hip–hop.”

That’s Theaster Gates, the artistic mind behind this installation. He calls it “The Listening Room.” Gates bought the records from a store in Chicago, when it went out of business about a year ago. For him, the albums are as much about ideas as they are about tunes.

Gates: “I’m really interested in how do we take stock of moments of cultural loss, like when a record store goes out of business.”

Gates hopes the music will jumpstart conversation about those moments. But this show is about more than a record collection.

Visitors lured into the gallery by the music may notice what look like tapestries made of coarse fabric on the walls across from the albums. The fabric is actually strips of firehoses.

Theaster Gates calls these “Civil Rights Tapestries.” They refer to an infamous 1963 event in Birmingham, Alabama. The chief of police ordered his officers to blast water from similar hoses at peaceful civil rights demonstrators.

Sandra Jackson–Dumont: “I think that’s one of the most exciting aspects of this show.”

Sandra Jackson–Dumont is Seattle Art Museum’s deputy director for education and public programs, and the adjunct curator for this exhibition.

Jackson–Dumont: “People will see something in there, will recognize so much of it, and be introduced to political, social and historical moments through music, through these objects.”

Jackson–Dumont loves Gates’ ideas about the role art plays in fostering community conversation. They dovetail perfectly with her goal of making Seattle Art Museum a crossroads for people from all types of backgrounds. She wants to create singular memorable experiences for museumgoers.

Jackson–Dumont: “Museums have to be places where people feel so inspired to come back over and over again because they’re trying to create that moment they had the last time over and over. So I’m personally, and as an institution, we are completely invested in creating these, like, critical moments that I have to say they are not always comfortable.”

Both Sandra Jackson–Dumont and Theaster Gates want to extend “The Listening Room” beyond the museum walls. To that end, SAM has set up a temporary satellite installation in Pioneer Square, and Gates wants people to encounter musical moments all over the city.

Gates: “Our hope is to identify sites that would be interesting for some of the music to show up at, to engage folk in political listening, the idea that people could come together and reflect on important moments together using the album as a minister, if you will.”

Back at the Seattle Art Museum, Sandra Jackson–Dumont and DJ Ayana Contreras are grooving to The Four Tops. Jackson–Dumont spots a young boy eyeing the records along the wall. She pulls out a copy of “Stevie Wonder’s Greatest Hits” and hands it to him.

Jackson–Dumont: “So you’ve never held a record before, huh?”

The boy eyes the vinyl dubiously. His dark eyes are wide.

Jackson–Dumont: “So, hold it like that; pull it out. Hold it like a pizza. Hold it, though.”

The boy’s mother snaps a photo on her phone.

Mother: “That was monumental event for him to hold his first LP.”

It’s a pop culture artifact that has almost faded into memory. Sandra Jackson–Dumont watches with a wide grin.

And, as if it was planned, DJ Ayana Contreras cranks up a song to match the moment.

I’m Marcie Sillman, KUOW News.

© Copyright 2011, KUOW

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