ISSUE Project Room celebrates the 20th Anniversary of its Artists-In-Residence (AIR) program throughout 2026 with performances by current residents and returning alumni. This anniversary season highlights AIRs whose work reflects the ongoing evolution of a much broader community of experimental artists who have helped shape ISSUE for over twenty years.
Friday, July 10th at 8pm, ISSUE presents Spiriting Off, a new solo work by 2026 Artist-In-Residence and luthier Webb Crawford for electric guitar, tenor banjo, and five-string banjo. Within the chordophone family of instruments—as defined by the Hornbostel–Sachs system—disparate forms are defined by the characteristic of having strings. Driven by unbalanced force, strings displace air or create disturbance in an electromagnetic field. Transducers render changes in air pressure as signal. Mass and acceleration work against restoring force, and vibration passes in opposing waves along the length of a string until inertia drives it back to stillness.
In Spiriting Off, these physical principles become a framework for Crawford’s performance as they move fluidly between instruments. Crawford notes, “Playing multiple instruments, or ‘doubling’, is a crucial aspect of musicianship: the transplantation of gestures and phrasing onto new intervals, shapes, timbres, and tonalities.”
Webb Crawford is a guitarist, banjoist, improviser and instrument-builder whose work considers relationships between maker, instrument, and player, traditional design conventions, and established performance practices. As a luthier, Crawford focuses on modern reconstructions of historical stringed instruments, recontextualizations of those instruments within experimental music, and the exchange dynamics of multi-player sound objects. In 2017, they worked with MASS MoCA to restore instruments built by composer and luthier Gunnar Schonbeck, and later created replicas of Schonbeck’s “triangular cellos” for Bennington College. Crawford has led and participated in instrument-building workshops at The Cooper Union, Connecticut College, the Bennington Museum, and Carnegie Hall (with Bash the Trash), and has worked for ten years as a guitar repair technician.
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ISSUE encourages a culture of respect around free arts programming–by honoring your RSVP, you recognize ISSUE’s ongoing efforts to cultivate new work by emerging artists. RSVPing for free events does not guarantee entry in limited capacity environments, and ISSUE encourages audiences to arrive on-time. If you can no longer attend this free event, please contact sylver@issueprojectroom.org to let us know. Thank you for respecting the reservation.
