Satch Hoyt: Celestial Vessel

NasherMuseum — April 18, 2010 — Satch Hoyt, an internationally acclaimed artist and musician based in Berlin, produced a monumental new sculptural work during his residency with the Nasher Museum in September 2009. Hoyt and a team of assistants constructed a 16-foot canoe titled Celestial Vessel, which is part of the Nasher Museum exhibition, The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl (September 2, 2010, through February 6, 2011). Materials for the work include a metal armature and vintage RCA Victor Red Seal 45-rpm records from the 1950s that Hoyt has collected. The work will also include an original soundscape composed by the artist. For more information please go to www.nasher.duke.edu.

This project is made possible by a Visiting Artist Grant from the Council for the Arts, Office of the Provost, Duke University.

Still photography by Dr. J Caldwell.
Video work by David Colagiovanni and Lydia Moyer
Music by Satch Hoyt "Griots and Cyber Crooks"

9th Wonder Trades in Studio to Sample Soul at Duke

9th Wonder Trades in Studio to Sample Soul at Duke
By Ross Green
March 4, 2010

There’s a rather distinguished group on hand at the Nasher for Professor Mark Anthony Neal’s African and African-American Studies 132 lecture.

On one side of the lecture hall stage, Neal discusses the legacy of Motown music with special guest Harry Weinger, Vice President of Artist and Repertoire at Universal Music Enterprises. Pierce Freelon, son of legendary jazz vocalist Nnenna Freelon and emcee of the North Carolina jazz-hip hop fusion outfit the Beast, occasionally peppers the two with questions from his seat in the audience. And 9th Wonder, the biggest name in the room, slouches in a chair opposite Neal and Weinger in front of a laptop. He provides the playlist for the evening’s event, alternating between classic Motown tracks and the hip-hop songs that have sampled them.

Nee Patrick Douthit of Winston-Salem, N.C., 9th Wonder has been a mainstay of the Triangle hip-hop scene since the early part of the decade, when his original group Little Brother released debut album The Listening in 2003. But since leaving the group in 2007, 9th has diversified his focus. He’s in the midst of producing Death of a Pop Star, a collaborative album with Mississippi rapper David Banner, and will release Fornever, his fourth album with indie hip-hop artist MURS March 30. The album’s first single “The Problem Is…” features unusually aggressive rhymes from MURS atop sparse, minimalist drums and gospel-tinged backing vocals.

“Fornever is [MURS and I’s] best record,” 9th says. “A lot of people say our best record was MURS 3:16, some people think it was MURS’ Revenge…but we did it again on this one.”

This is high praise, given the considerable critical acclaim afforded each of their first three collaborations, but 9th is setting his sights even higher. In 2009, he created two independent record labels, Jamla and The Academy, and has recruited a stable of North Carolina emcees for both. He’s also the lead composer for videogame giant EA Sports title NBA Live ’11, due in October.

“The [EA Sports] team is talking about making me an unlockable character,” 9th says with a grin.

His recent exploits have extended to academics as well, having taught classes at North Carolina Central University for the past three years. In addition to teaching a hip-hop history class pro bono at Barber-Scotia College in Concord, N.C. this semester, he is the co-professor, along with Neal, of African and African-American Studies 132 at Duke, entitled Sampling Soul. The project, he says, has been gestating for some time.

Read the Full Article @ The Chronicle

'Sampling Motown' @ The Nasher Museum

'Sampling Motown' Lecture Open to the Public

Harry Weinger, vice president of A&R for Universal Music Enterprises, is the guest speaker.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Harry Weinger, vice president of A&R for Universal Music Enterprises and a 30-year veteran of the entertainment industry, is the guest speaker at next week’s “Sampling Motown” class at Duke University.

Weinger’s lecture, at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 23, in the lecture hall at Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art, will focus on the music of Motown. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.; the lecture is free and open to the public.A recording of the event will be available at Duke on Demand.

The spring semester course, “Sampling Soul,” is co-taught by African and African American Studies professor Mark Anthony Neal and Grammy Award-winning music producer 9th Wonder. Each weekly class emphasizes a different aspect of sampling, from its history to legal considerations. The “Sampling Motown” class will highlight the music of the civil rights era.

“Harry is one of the most important shepherds of the soul music tradition and we all have a greater understanding of the impact that soul music has on American culture because of Harry's thoughtful explorations of Motown's musical archive," Neal said.

Weinger has produced, mixed, written and edited liner notes for hundreds of reissues, compilations and music DVDs, notably the Motown family of classic recordings, the James Brown catalog, the Verve Music catalog, and prominent funk, soul and jazz artists.

Among several projects, Weinger has documented every Motown single released during the company’s heyday in a multi-disc box set series. He also helped organize the many events and releases surrounding Motown Records’ 50th anniversary.

The “Sampling Soul” class explores how the songs that made up the soundtrack of social movements, such as the civil rights and black power movements of the 1960s and 1970s, remain relevant in contemporary culture. Students learn how soul music is continuously referenced in popular culture via movies, commercials and television sitcoms, forming a lucrative cultural archive.

Weinger’s appearance complements an upcoming Nasher exhibition, “The Record: Contemporary Art & Vinyl,” which will explore the culture of vinyl records within the history of contemporary art. The exhibition, set to open in September, is comprised of sound, sculpture, drawing, painting, photography, video and performance.

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of four books, including “New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity” and the forthcoming “Looking for Leroy.” His essays have been anthologized in a dozen books, such as the recently released “Born To Use Mics: Reading Nas’s Illmatic,” edited by Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai.

9th Wonder, born Patrick Douthit, is a former member of the hip-hop trio Little Brother which released the critically acclaimed albums “The Listening” and “The Minstrel Show.” He has produced music for Jay-Z, Destiny’s Child, Mary J. Blige, and Erykah Badu among others. He also scored the music for “The Boondocks” animated television series. He was recently selected as the NAACP’s national ambassador for hip-hop relations and culture.

Opening Barkley: The Birth of Cool

from CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com

Critical Noir: Opening Barkley
by Mark Anthony Neal

Birth of Cool, a retrospective exhibition on the life and work of artist Barkley L. Hendricks recently opened at the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, North Carolina. Conceived by Trevor Schoonmaker, the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum and Richard J. Powell, the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, Birth of Cool is the first such retrospective of the Philadelphia native's work. According to Powell, the foremost scholar of Hendricks's work, the idea of a Hendricks retrospective was "beguiling, with the idea to encounter old friends, audacious strangers, and engrossing paintings, it seems, for the very first time." The exhibition's opening night was reflective of Powell's observations bringing together an eclectic group of people for a discussion between Hendricks and Powell, which was followed by an after-party that featured Grammy-award winning producer and DJ 9th Wonder.

Trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts and Yale University, Hendricks emerges in the late 1960s just as "Black Power" became synonymous with black vernacular culture via the agitprop of Black Arts Movement figures like Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal. Hendricks was primarily interested in figurative and life sized portraiture, thus his subjects, more often than not, were simply the bodies of everyday black folk. Hendricks's aesthetic commitment to the "folk" likely helped keep him beyond the radar of the mainstream art world. As Franklin Sirmans, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Mencil Collection in Houston, "these are black people who are rarely glimpsed outside their community (not art galleries), but within these communities they can easily be seen just as easily as symbols of vibrant everyday life." As such, over the past few decades, Hendricks has helped establish black bodies as sites vernacular culture--his influence seen in the work of younger artists such as Kehinde Wiley and even Iona Rozeal Brown.

Read Full Essay at CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com