This year’s Benefit celebrates Annea Lockwood, an artist whose explorations of the rich world of natural acoustic sounds and environments are shaped by a lifelong fascination with timbre and new sound sources. In works ranging from sound art and environmental sound installations to concert music, Lockwood’s work demonstrates the deep complexity that can be revealed within seemingly simple sounds.

ISSUE's 2021 Benefit features an evening of works composed or inspired by Annea Lockwood. The program includes presentations by Yamaha piano artists Kathleen Supové, performing Lockwood's Gone! and her own composition Avian Cradle, and Laura Barger, a 2012 ISSUE Artist-in-Residence (with ensemble Yarn/Wire) presenting Lockwood's RCSC. A commission by drummer, producer, and composer Savannah Harris further celebrates the enduring resonance of the Womens Work project, responding to Ruth Anderson's Silent sound score. Additional presentations include a first-time collaboration by 2021 Artist-in-Residence and violist Joanna Mattrey with composer and sound artist Miya Masaoka, as well as archival video from Lockwood's storied Glass Concert, as well as eyeSpace ('40) from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Performances will be preceded by a cocktail reception and desserts from Natasha Pickowicz with Never Ending Taste.

Since her 2006 presentation of Ground of Being in ISSUE’s Gowanus Silo, Annea has worked with the organization across many years and different homes, inspiring generations of artists in our community. During Winter/Spring 2021, ISSUE presented With Womens Work, an online series commissioning fourteen artists to create new works inspired by the scores included in Womens Work (1975), a magazine that Annea co-edited and self-published with Alison Knowles. Womens Work sought to highlight the overlooked work of female artists operating at the cusp of the visual arts, music, and performance. The project’s resistance to gender barriers and disciplinary boundaries continues to resonate deeply with ISSUE’s mission. Through the Series and the Benefit, co-curated by 2021 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow Sami Hopkins, we are delighted to honor Annea, advance the work of an emerging generation of artists and curators, while emphasizing the spirit of collaboration.

Throughout the 1960s, Annea often worked with sound poets, choreographers and visual artists, and championed an interdisciplinary score-based ecology through the Womens Work project that simultaneously offered an invaluable counterpoint to the male avant-garde canon. During this time, and in synchronous homage to Christian Barnard’s pioneering heart transplants, Annea also began a series of Piano Transplants (1969-72) in which pianos beyond repair were burned, drowned, and planted in an English garden. These iconic works became a testament to Lockwood’s focus on elemental and natural sound sources and interdisciplinary interventions, where the piano becomes played by its environmental and contextual circumstance.

Recently, Annea has also produced works including Becoming Air for trumpet, co-composed with performer, composer, and 2011 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Nate Wooley that premiered at ISSUE in 2018, as well as Into the Vanishing Point, co-composed with renowned quartet and 2012 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Yarn/Wire, that serves as a meditation on the large-scale disappearance of insect populations. Both pieces will be released on Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle label in September, 2021. Annea's work has also focused on our relationship with the non-human environment and recognizes how interdependent we are with the phenomenal world. That gave rise to the three different river Sound Maps installations, of the Hudson (1982), Danube (2005), Housatonic (2009), and her collaboration with Bob Bielecki, Wild Energy (2014), a site-specific installation focused on geophysical, atmospheric, and mammalian infra- and ultra- sound sources, permanently installed at the Caramoor Center for Music and Arts in Katonah, New York - where ISSUE will also co-present Piano Garden. 

For more information contact: Corinne Daniel, Development Director (718) 330-0313 x5 or corinne@issueprojectroom.org



ISSUE’s 2021 Benefit is proudly supported by the ISSUE Project Room Board with Lead Sponsors: Nancy & Joe Walker

Photo by Karla Pringle from Annea Lockwood’s LP Becoming Air / Into the Vanishing Point released on Black Truffle