The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl

Tour Schedule

Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (originating venue)
September 2, 2010 - February 6, 2011

Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston
April 15 - September 5, 2011

Miami Art Museum
March 18 - June 10, 2012

Henry Art Gallery, Seattle
July 14 - October 7, 2012

Selected Press

The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, organized by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, is the first museum exhibition to explore the culture of vinyl records within the history of contemporary art. Bringing together artists from around the world who have worked with records as their subject or medium, this groundbreaking exhibition examines the record's transformative power from the 1960s to the present.

Through sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, photography, sound work, video and performance, The Record combines contemporary art with outsider art, audio with visual, and fine art with popular culture.

The exhibition features 99 works by 41 artists, including rising stars in the contemporary art world (William Cordova, Robin Rhode, Dario Robleto), outsider artists (Mingering Mike), well-established artists (Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha, Carrie Mae Weems) and artists whose work will be shown in a U.S. museum for the first time (Kevin Ei-ichi deForest, Jeroen Diepenmaat, Taiyo Kimura, Lyota Yagi).

Since the heyday of vinyl, and through its decline and recent resurgence, a surprising number of artists have worked with vinyl records. The Record presents some of the best, rarest and most unexpected examples. The artists in the exhibition use the vinyl record as metaphor, archive, artifact, icon, portrait, or transcendent medium.

- Trevor Schoonmaker, Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher
Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum

Podcast: The Record

The Record includes a broad range of works, such as a hybrid violin and record player, Viophonograph, a seminal work by Laurie Anderson; David Byrne's original life-sized Polaroid photomontage used for the cover of the 1978 Talking Heads album More Songs About Buildings and Food; a monumental column of vinyl records by Cordova; and an important early work by Robleto, who transformed Billie Holiday records in an alchemic process to create hand-painted buttons. Works by Christian Marclay, who has made art with records for 30 years, include his early and rarely seen Recycled Records as well as his most recent record video, Looking for Love.

Two of the works on view at the ICA were commissioned specifically for the exhibition by The Nasher Museum. Berlin-based artist Satch Hoyt created a 16-foot canoe made of red 45-rpm records with an original soundscape during a 2009 artist residency at Duke. New York artist Xaviera Simmons created photographs of the North Carolina landscape and solicited musical responses from musicians such as Mac McCaughan of Superchunk, Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio and Jim James of My Morning Jacket. The original songs will be pressed onto a 12-inch record and played with her installation.

Artists

Artists in the exhibition include Laurie Anderson (1947 USA), Felipe Barbosa (1978 Brazil), David Byrne (1952 Scotland), Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller (1957 & 1960 Canada)*, William Cordova (1971 Peru), Moyra Davey (1958 Canada), Kevin Ei-ichi deForest (1962 Canada), Jeroen Diepenmaat (1978 Netherlands), Sean Duffy (1966 USA), Yukio Fujimoto (1950 Japan), Jack Goldstein (1945 Canada), Rodney Graham (1949 Canada)*, Harrison Haynes (1973 USA)*, Gregor Hildebrandt (1974 Germany), Satch Hoyt (1957 UK), Jasper Johns (1930 USA), Taiyo Kimura (1970 Japan), Tim Lee (1975 Korea), Ralph Lemon (1952 USA), Christian Marclay (1955 USA), David McConnell (1975 USA), Mingering Mike (1950 USA), Dave Muller (1964 USA), Ujino Muneteru (1964 Japan), Vik Muniz and Carlos da Silva Assunção Filho aka Cafi (1961 & 1950 Brazil)*, Patrick Douthit aka 9th Wonder (1975 USA)*, DJ Rekha (1971 UK)*, Robin Rhode (1976 South Africa), Dario Robleto (1972 USA), Ed Ruscha (1937 USA), Malick Sidibé (1935 Mali), Xaviera Simmons (1974 USA), Mark Soo (1977 Singapore), Meredyth Sparks (1972 USA), Su-Mei Tse (1973 Luxembourg), Fatimah Tuggar (1967 Nigeria), Alice Wagner (1974 Peru), Carrie Mae Weems (1953 USA), and Lyota Yagi (1980 Japan).
* "Cover to Cover" crate curator list

The accompanying Cover to Cover installation installation features 7 listening stations designed by 9 artists and musicians who each curated a crate of 20 albums that tell a story through the cover visuals. Visitors will peruse the crates and with headphones listen to records on record players.

Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated 216-page color catalogue distributed by Duke University Press and available at the ICA Store and at the Nasher Museum Store ($45, paperback). It includes an introduction by curator Trevor Schoonmaker, statements by each artist in the exhibition and essays that balance personal reflection with critical exploration and scholarly analysis. Contributors include:

• Jeff Chang
  • whose first book, Can't Stop Won't Stop (2005) won the American Book Award, the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, and the Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research. He edited Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop (2007) and was named a 2008 USA Ford Fellow in Literature.
• Vivien Goldman
  • a widely published journalist for publications including the New York Times. The most recent of her five books is The Book of Exodus: the Making and Meaning of Bob Marley and the Wailers' Album of the Century (2006). She is the adjunct professor of punk and reggae at New York University. Her work as a post-punk singer-songwriter is frequently reissued.
• Jennifer Kabat
  • a design writer and critic. Her journalism has appeared in the Financial Times, Wired, Wallpaper, The Guardian, Condé Nast Traveler, and New York magazine.
• Josh Kun
  • author of Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (2005) and coauthor of And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl: The Jewish Past as Told by the Records We Have Loved and Lost (2008). He is a professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California and a founding member of the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation.
• Barbara London
  • a curator of media and the founder of the video-exhibition and collection programs at The Museum of Modern Art. She has organized more than 120 exhibitions, including one-person shows featuring Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, Joan Jonas, and Laurie Anderson, and thematic projects such as New Video from China; Anime!; Automatic Update, and Looking at Music: Side 2.
• Mac McCaughan
  • a founding member of the rock band Superchunk and cofounder of Merge Records, based in Durham, N.C. He also records and performs under the name Portastatic.
• Carlo McCormick
  • senior editor of Paper magazine and a popular-culture critic/curator. He lives and works in New York.
• Charles McGovern
  • who teaches American studies and history at the College of William and Mary. He is the author of Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890—1945 (2006), and with Susan Strasser and Mattias Judt coedited Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century (1998). He is at work on a book tracing the histories of race and citizenship in American popular music. He is a former curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, where he wrote, curated exhibitions, and built extensive recording collections, all on the history of jazz, blues, gospel, country, rock and soul.
• Mark Anthony Neal
  • author of four books: New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (2005), Songs in the Keys of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), and What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998). Neal is also the coeditor (with Murray Forman) of That's the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2004). Neal is a professor of black popular culture in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University. A frequent commentator for National Public Radio, Neal also contributes to several online media outlets, including SeeingBlack.com, The Root.com, and theGrio.com.
• Piotr Orlov
  • a Brooklyn-based critic, curator, and events producer. He co-organized the music program for the exhibition, Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, has written about house and African techno for the New York Times, and throws a monthly dance-party called Treehouse. By day, Orlov is a creative writer for Mother Industries.
• Luc Sante
  • whose books include Folk Photography (2009), Kill All Your Darlings (2007), The Factory of Facts (1998), Evidence (1992), and Low Life (1991). He teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College.
• Dave Tompkins
  • whose first book How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder, from World War II to Hip Hop (2010) is out on Stop Smiling Books/Melville House. He is from North Carolina.

Curator

Trevor Schoonmaker, Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum, organized the exhibition. His previous exhibitions at the Nasher Museum include Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool (2008-10) and Street Level: Mark Bradford, William Cordova and Robin Rhode (2007-08). Prior to joining the Nasher Museum his exhibitions included The Beautiful Game: Contemporary Art and Fútbol (2006), DTroit (2003-04), and Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti (2003-05). He edited the book Fela: From West Africa to West Broadway.

Thank You

The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl is made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Major support is provided by Marilyn M. Arthur, the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, Duke University's Council for the Arts, the N.C. Arts Council, a division of the Department of Cultural Resources, Charles Weinraub and Emily Kass, E. Blake Byrne, Barbra and Andrew Rothschild, Christen and Derek Wilson, and the Graduate Liberal Studies program at Duke University. This program is supported in part, by public funds from the Netherlands Cultural Services. Additional support is provided by Dr. and Mrs. Robert F. Allen, Catherine Karmel, Peggy and John Murray, Francine and Benson Pilloff, Caroline and Arthur Rogers, Olympia Stone and Sims Preston, Angela O. Terry, Richard Tigner, Nancy Palmer Wardropper, Peter Lange and Lori Leachman, Lauren and Neill Goslin and Merge Records.

   

The media sponsor for the presentation in Boston is:

Image credit: Fatimah Tuggar, "Turntable" (work on which "Fai-fain Gramophone," 2010, is based) (detail), 1996. Record player, raffia discs with labels, music by Barmani Choge, entertainment center; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

Photo of Trevor Schoonmaker by Hank Willis Thomas

Website design by David Colagiovanni and Benjamin Dauer.

All Content © Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University