Discovering the Music of Paintings, with Oliver Prezant and Friends
Featuring the artwork of Nishiki Sugawara-Beda
October 8 at 10:00am - 11:30am
Doors open at 9:30am.
Ticket price: $25.00
This event is a production of Opus OP LLC.
Discovering the Music of Paintings is an interactive exploration and performance with Oliver Prezant and Friends, featuring the artwork of Nishiki Sugawara-Beda and improvising musicians Carla Kountoupes, violin, Jerry Weimer, clarinet, and Katie Harlow, cello. The program will be presented on Saturday, October 8, from 10:00-11:30 a.m. at Strata Gallery, 418 Cerrillos Road, in the Design Center. Seating is limited.
During the program, conductor and arts educator Oliver Prezant will lead the audience in an interactive, visual exploration of Nishiki Sugawara-Beda’s evocative internal landscapes, which she creates with traditional Japanese Sumi ink. Audience members will be invited to describe the lines, shapes, textures and feelings suggested by the paintings, and from those impressions will create Haiku, short, three-line poems, that Oliver and the musicians will turn into musical realizations of the artwork. The artist will be present during the program.
Nishiki says, “I am seriously playful, playfully serious, and seriously me.”
“Nishiki’s paintings are both intimate and expansive,” said Prezant. “Each one of them is a world unto itself, and in those worlds, the traditional meets the abstract, contrast creates balance, and contemplation is inspired by composition. I’m very excited to hear the poetry and music that we create based on her beautiful paintings!”
“Carla, Jerry, and Katie are some of my favorite musicians for this kind of special performance,” he said. “Highly trained, musically flexible, and great improvisers. We’ll be rehearsing, yes, but the musicians won’t see the paintings until the day of the performance, and we won’t hear the poetry until the audience creates it.”
Photo captions and credits:
Conductor and arts educator Oliver Prezant: Ruthanne Greeley
Violinist Carla Kountoupes: Will Wilson (Diné)
Clarinetist Jerry Weimer: Nacha Mendez
Cellist Katie Harlow: Joseph Sabella
Painting: KuroKuroShiro 7DVII by Nishiki Sugawara-Beda
ARTIST AND MUSICIANS’ BIOS:
Artist Nishiki Sugawara-Beda working in her studio.
Nishiki Sugawara-Beda is a Japanese-American visual artist based in painting and installation. She draws upon her Japanese heritage to explore themes related to culture, language, and spirituality rooted in Zen Buddhism. Connecting across space and time, she experiments in ancient Japanese materials and techniques including Sumi ink, Kakejiku landscapes, and rice paper, to merge them with abstract and expressive forms familiar to the modern Western aesthetic. Sugawara-Beda exhibits her work in solo and group exhibitions and offers lectures nationally and internationally to promote cultural diversity and exchange. Exhibition venues include the Spartanburg Art Museum (SC), Morris Graves Museum of Art (CA), Dennos Museum (MI), Amos Eno Gallery (NY), and Cris Worley Fine Arts (TX). Publications include New American Paintings, AEQAI, Athenaeum Review, London Post, Art Spiel, and WhiteHot. Awards including a Seed Grant, Diversity Fellowship, International Enhancement Grant, Idaho Arts Fellowship, Sam Taylor Fellowship, Tusen Takk Foundation residency, and Dallas Museum of Art Otis and Velma Davis Dozier Travel Fund have supported her artistic research. In addition to national conferences, including the College Art Association, Sugawara-Beda also gives keynote speeches and workshops to cultural organizations including Pilipino American Unity for Progress, Inc., OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates, and Business Council for the Arts, Dallas. See You There, a full-color art book surveying her work from 2012 to 2020, is published by Execute Magazine in 2021.
Oliver Prezant has presented lectures and education programs for the Santa Fe Opera, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, the National Hispanic Cultural Center, Performance Santa Fe, the Tanglewood Association of Volunteers, Road Scholar, and the Guilds of the Santa Fe and San Francisco Opera companies. As the music director and conductor of the Santa Fe Community Orchestra, he worked with community musicians and choristers, professional soloists, public school music students, composers, creative artists, and community partners from Santa Fe and northern New Mexico to present a wide variety of innovative performances, unique education programs, and community collaborations. He has presented programs on the relationship of art and music for the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, the Albuquerque Museum of Art, the New Mexico Museum of Art, and the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art. Oliver was one of the founding teaching artists in Partners in Education’s ArtWorks Program, which provides arts education workshops for Santa Fe Public Schools students and teachers in the areas of music, poetry, visual art, theater, and dance. As the artistic advisor to the program, he trained teaching artists and classroom teachers, and coordinated with area poets, museums, and other arts organizations. He studied at the Mannes College of Music in New York City and the Pierre Monteux School for conductors in Hancock, Maine, and he was an Assistant Professor in the Contemporary Music Program at the College of Santa Fe and an instructor at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.
Carla Kountoupes, violinist, is a member of the Santa Fe Symphony Orchestra, Arizona Opera Orchestra, Santa Fe Pro Musica Chamber Orchestra, and Piazzolla da Camera Piano Trio. Carla has toured and performed professionally with orchestras and chamber ensembles in Central America, Taiwan, Germany, and all over the United States, including as a member of the New Century Chamber Orchestra in San Francisco and the Costa Rican National Symphony Orchestra. She enjoys performing and recording many genres in addition to classical, including Latin/world, alt-rock/pop, and jazz. A dedicated music educator, Carla is on the faculty at the New Mexico School for the Arts, and she is the director of the orchestra program at the Mandela International Magnet School in Santa Fe. She is a graduate of Oberlin Conservatory (Violin Performance) and Oberlin College (English Literature). Carla’s violin was made in the 1740s and was inherited from her grandfather.
Jerry Weimer is a composer and clarinetist who has been a part of the Santa Fe music scene since 2001. Known for his unique sound, stylistic versatility, and compelling improvisations, Jerry is a regular presence in the Jazz and Latin music communities of Northern New Mexico and was a featured soloist with the Santa Fe Community Orchestra in Weber’s Clarinet Concerto No. 1. He has collaborated with many local artists, including Nacha Mendez, Joaquin Gallegos, Jono Manson, Nosotros, Rumelia, John Rangel, the Shiners Club Jazz Band, Revózo, and Victor Alvarez’s SAVOR. Recent performances include Le Carnaval des Animaux with the National Dance Institute, and Amane, with Joe Hay, Words in the Wind, with Melanie Monsour, and Zozobra in 2021. Jerry is a graduate of the College of Santa Fe where he studied with Eddie Daniels.
Katie Harlow, cellist, has performed on cello, mandolin, accordion, and viola da gamba in numerous symphonic, chamber, early, folk, and improvised music ensembles, including the Santa Fe Symphony, the Chamber Orchestra of Albuquerque, New Music New Mexico, the New Mexico Women Composer's Guild, Opera Southwest, the early music groups Three Bass Blondes and the Boxwood Consort, the improvising music ensembles Out of Context and Playroom, the Bill Horvitz Band (jazz and new music), Cicadas, a mandolin ensemble, the folk music groups Bailiwick and Caledonia, and the band Basement Dancing. In addition, she has created arrangements and compositions for concerts, recordings, and theater productions. Katie holds a Bachelors in Cello Pedagogy and a Masters in Music Education from the University of New Mexico, and was on the faculty of Albuquerque Academy for many years.