If a paint brush were a musical instrument, what would your favorite painting sound like?
This question may unfortunately never be answerable, but in the meantime, a new exhibit at the ASU Art Museum offers a chance to look at how the visual and aural arts may be related.
The exhibit, simply titled "Art Inspires Music," will feature paintings from the museum's permanent collection side-by-side with songs written by local musicians. They aren't just any songs, though -- each song was written over a period of two months by the musicians after choosing a painting to work with.
The exhibit will open in the Interdisciplinary Gallery, a space within ASU's Art Museum where the museum's staff works with guest curators to create a dialogue between different forms of artistic expression, says John Spiak, a curator who has been with the museum for 12 years.
The gallery came as a result of research about what the museum's visitors would like to see changed, Spiak says.
People were generally unenthused by the work that previously occupied the Interdisciplinary Gallery's space, which they felt was stagnant, he says.
"We've been thinking a lot about inspiration," Spiak says. "We wanted to see if the processes involved with creating visual arts and writing songs could come together in one place."
The musicians who recorded their work come from the local music scene. Stephen Recker performs with Reindeer Tiger/Team, as well as solo under the title Wonderful Wednesday. He wrote a song in response to John Allen Dawson's "Untitled (woman with lips)."
"It was definitely a different process to sit down and work from an image rather than from an impulse," Recker says. "Here was this image, and it didn't go away --I kept rediscovering the artwork."
Recker says that the song he wrote is more about the theme of the painting than the imagery used, and he hopes to repeat the process again on his own time.
Also contributing songs are Yolanda Bejarano (in response to Ron Wagner's "Ben Goo"), who plays with Snow Songs; Aaron Gerwien of Blackfeet (in response to Leonard Baskin's "Worchester"); and Robin Vining (in response to Russell Crotty's "Towers and Dishes"), who currently performs with the Sweetbleeders, Colorstore, and Fatigo, among others. The songs will be available for purchase on a limited edition CD that will be available in the museum's gift shop.
The guest curator for the exhibit is Kimber Lanning, the owner of the local record store Stinkweeds and the downtown Phoenix gallery and performing arts venue Modified Arts.
Lanning's involvement started when she met with Spiak and a few other personnel from the museum last September. The idea for the exhibit came about through brainstorming, although it made perfect sense afterward, Lanning says.
"It's important to me because it ties together both of my worlds, because I'm so much into the music world and the visual arts world," she says.
Once the idea was hashed out, the difficult phase began -- selecting the musicians who would participate.
"There's a lot of amazing musicians here, so it was a difficult process for me," Lanning says. "I went to see the people I had in mind perform, and several others, and just sort of went with my gut."
Once selected, the musicians went to pick out their artwork. The pieces came from the museum's permanent collection, Lanning says, which is in a basement full of walls on rollers that can be pulled out to see the paintings they hold.
The project represents more than just a one-time exhibit, Lanning says -- it's a sign of the vitality of the art scene in the Valley.
"Phoenix is really blossoming right now," she says. "There's so much creativity right now, and there's so many opportunities for young musicians and young visual artists."
Reach the reporter at benjamin.horowitz@asu.edu.
