Visionary Trumpeter/Composer Wadada Leo Smith to Present First NYC Solo Exhibition

Visionary trumpeter/composer and musical pioneer Wadada Leo Smith will present more than a half century of his Ankhrasmation art-scores at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City.

The exhibition, entitled Kosmic Music, will run from September 26, 2024 to July 3, 2025 in conjunction with Aviary, a site-specific piece by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and artist Raven Chacon, a former student of Smith's at CalArts. 

The exhibition will be on view at Arts and Letters, located at Audubon Terrace, on Broadway between West 155 and 156 Streets, New York City. Click here for more information.

The opening weekend of the exhibitions will be celebrated on Saturday, September 28 with a special performance by the RedKoral Quartet featuring violinists Shalini Vijayan and Mona Tian, violist Andrew McIntosh and cellist Ashley Walters. The ensemble will perform Wadada's String Quartet No. 17, subtitled The Capital, Washington DC: An American Experiment with Democracy and Capitalism, for the first time in its complete string quartet iteration. The program will also feature two works by Raven Chacon—Journey of the Horizontal People, 2016, and Double Weaving, 2018—and will culminate in a duo performance by the two composers. This concert will take place at Arts and Letters at 4 p.m. Tickets are $10 for general admission and $5 for students and can be purchased here. Wadada's exhibition Kosmic Music will be on view from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m on the day of the concert.

Smith considers the Ankhrasmation symbolic music language to be a discovery from inspiration that he realized in 1967, the fruit of a search he'd begun three years earlier. He's spent the ensuing 50-plus years researching, developing and learning how to create music from the language. Its symbolic nature allows each performer the opportunity and responsibility to discover and develop their own relationship to the language and the art that they use to create the music. Each artist's methodology is personal to their own practice and never shared with their fellow musicians. Each performer's research as to how they use the art-score's properties to create music is what makes their contribution unique allowing for, as Wadada says, “a pure and unique performance, where multiple sources are generated from a single symbol, color, shape, or line by the artists.”

The name combines the inspiration of “Ankh,” the Egyptian symbol for life; “Ras,” the Ethiopian word for leader; and “Ma”, a universal term for mother; its roots are in the ancient and the universal. “What makes an Ankhrasmation art-score different from any other kind of art- or music-making practice,” Smith explains, is that “its complete realization is achieved when it is both seen in an exhibition as visual art and also heard in a performance as music. Both of them equally share this space of creativity that I have constructed, and both should be enjoyed, simultaneously or at different times.”

Kosmic Music represents more than five decades of Smith's work. The exhibition features career-spanning art-scores from five series: “Music of the Spheres” (inspired by Charles Ives' unfinished Universe Symphony); “Sonic and Rhythmic Particles” (inspired by Einstein's theories), “Jupiter, Jupiter in Black Space and Jupiter in Silver Space,” “Four Earth Ages” (ranging from the Ice Age to the “danger zone” of the Nuclear Age); and “Four Symphonies” along with four books of Wadada's “Image-Poems” connected to the Four Symphonies.
 
The art-scores are bold and evocative in their own right: vivid colors swirl in graceful shapes; geometric figures orbit one another or assemble into multi-hued towers; planets and satellites suggest cosmic tones; abstract symbols hint at ancient runes or maps to the unknown. String Quartet No. 17, which will be performed by RedKoral Quartet on September 28, incorporates the “Jupiter in Silver Space” art-score.

Wadada Leo Smith 

Composer, trumpeter and author Wadada Leo Smith is one of the creative music world's most heralded artists. Born December 18, 1941 in Leland, MS, he grew up steeped in the musical traditions of the South performing in Delta Blues and other traditional bands, eventually moving to Chicago where he joined the legendary AACM collective. Smith defines his music as “Creative Music,” and his diverse discography reveals a recorded history of music centered in the idea of spiritual harmony and the unification of social and cultural issues of his world. Among his major recordings are Ten Freedom Summers, America's National Parks and String Quartets Nos. 1-12.

A finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Smith has received numerous other awards and honors including a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hammer Museum's 2016 Mohn Award for Career Achievement "honoring brilliance and resilience,” the UCLA Medal, the University's highest honor, and the 2022 Vision Festival's Lifetime Achievement Award, among many others. He was selected as a 2021 United States Artists' USA Fellow and named a 2022 Mellon Arts & Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration. In 2023 he was selected for induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

An esteemed educator, from 1994–2013 Smith was on the faculty at The Herb Alpert School of Music at California Institute of the Arts, where he served as director of the African-American Improvisational Music program. He continues to give workshops and master classes worldwide and most recently served as the Spring 2024 Fromm Foundation Visiting Lecturer on Music at Harvard University.

Arts and Letters

Founded in 1898 and located in landmark buildings in Washington Heights, the American Academy of Arts and Letters is an Honor Society of artists, architects, composers, and writers who foster and sustain interest in the arts. Arts and Letters's 300 members honor and support creative individuals, notably through over seventy annual awards and prizes. 
 
Arts and Letters will open 10,000 square feet of its Beaux Arts–style galleries to the public year-round in September 2024. The major milestone in the institution's 125-year history is accompanied by a new curatorial program featuring solo exhibitions, original commissions by contemporary artists, and interdisciplinary events. The galleries of Arts and Letters are open Thursday to Sunday from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. and are free and open to the public. Please visit artsandletters.org for more information.   

Wadada Leo Smith Kosmic Music

September 26, 2024 – July 3, 2025
American Academy of Arts and Letters
Audubon Terrace, New York, NY 10032
Gallery hours: Thursday through Sunday, 12–6 p.m.
Opening weekend performance Saturday, September 28 at 4 p.m.
wadadaleosmith.com
artsandletters.org