artelier

Deaf Artist Christine Sun Kim Is Reinventing Sound

For artist Christine Sun Kim, sound is a “ghost.” The multiple-MFA-holding Senior TED Fellow who has had a Whitney Museum residency and exhibited at MoMA, has been profoundly deaf since birth. The sonic hush in which she lives has pushed her towards exploring sound through her work in a varied oeuvre of performance, installation, drawing, and video.

Initially, Kim strove to translate sound into direct visual terms. She experimented with vibrations, placing coated paintbrushes and inked quills on wooden boards atop subwoofers and speakers pulsing with ambient noise. Her process resulted in lovely minimalist paintings, audibles turned objets d'art. But the project felt like translating a text using only half the alphabet. “Low frequency sounds—vibrations—only make up a very small fraction of the sound world,” she explains. When it came to capturing the rich tapestry of Kim’s lived experience with sound, this approach fell short.

Naho Kubota for Mmuseumm

An Artist Recreates Her Mother’s All-White-Everything Closet

“Sara was beautiful inside and out; her hair was white, and she wore only white clothes,” explains the artist Maira Kalman in the audio guide to her her exhibition, “Sara Berman’s Clost,” a painstaking recreation of her mother’s closet.

Photograph by Mark Woods/Courtesy of GavinBrown’s Enterprise

On View | Obamarama

Every morning since President Obama’s inauguration in 2009, the artist Rob Pruitt has made a small portrait of the commander in chief.