Between Sound and Sight: Mapping the Sonic Imprint of Charles White’s Vision

The South Side Community Art Center, Hyde Park Jazz Festival, Logan Center for the Arts, and the University of Chicago Presents invite you to Between Sound & Sight: Mapping the Sonic Imprint of Charles White’s Vision, a FREE day-long symposium offered in conjunction with the February 14th performance by pianist/composer Gerald Clayton of his original suite, White Cities: A Musical Tribute to Charles White at the Logan Center for the Arts. The symposium will explore sound, image, and history, offering a deeper engagement with Charles White’s multi-dimensional legacy. Discussions will consider White’s work with musicians and music media—such as illustrations for jazz album covers and film and television, as well as his paintings, etchings and drawings of musicians—and ways in which his work and legacy continue to reverberate across the cultural landscape, particularly as an influence for contemporary artists.

 On February 14th, the evening before the symposium, Gerald Clayton will perform his piece White Cities: A Musical Tribute to Charles White, honoring the connection between music and visual art that permeates Charles White’s artistic vision. Secure your tickets here.

SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE

Saturday, February 15, 2025 - Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts

11:00 AM         Check-In, Welcome, and Keynote

Keynote: "Greetings from Altadena." by Ian White
Charles White’s son and chief executive of The Charles White Archives

11:30 AM         Panel One: Sounds of the Black Archive: Charles White’s Contributions to Film, Television, and Music Media

Throughout his career, Charles White contributed many illustrations for album jackets (mostly jazz recordings), books, television, and film. This panel will explore White’s work with/in music-related media. Examples include Vanguard Records album sleeve illustrations, an accompanying LP for the film Leadbelly directed by Gordon Parks, and illustrations for publications by Harry Belafonte and television collaborations. The discussion will include contemporary artists who also create and incorporate visual media into music contexts, or vice versa, for their projects or others.

Moderator: John Corbett

Panelists: Damon Locks, Cauleen Smith, and Ian White

12:30 PM Lunch Conversation with Lamar Gayles on Charles White and the SSCAC

Lamar Gayles, Archives and Collections Manager of the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC) will provide a brief overview of the history of the SSCAC and its relationship with Charles White and invite participants to view three Charles White works that are part of the SSCAC collection during lunch

1:15 PM         Panel Two: Visual & Musical Composition: Inspiration, Collaboration, & the Black Aesthetic

An element of inspiration for pianist/composer Gerald Clayton in creating his suite, White Cities: A Musical Tribute to Charles White, was to explore White’s visual composition and narrative in the mural Five Great American Negroes and respond musically. This panel will explore how visual artists and musicians find inspiration in visual and sound/music practice and how these influences are rendered compositionally and as points of convergence and meaning-making.

Moderator: Travis Jackson

Panelists: Gerald Clayton, Angel Bat Dawid, Douglas R. Ewart

2:30 PM         Panel Three: Figures in Music: Charles White’s Portraits  

Charles White’s portraits of musicians such as Leadbelly, Harry Belafonte, Bessie Smith, and Mahalia Jackson are some of his best-known works. This panel will explore White’s extraordinary portraiture of music-makers and how his relationships with some of these musicians and their work influenced his compositions and activism. In particular, the panel will consider White’s portraits of Black women in music.

Moderator: Melanie Herzog

Panelists: Daniel Schulman, Benjamin Jones, Tammy Kernodle

3:30 PM         Symposium Closing

MORE ABOUT OUR GUEST MODERATORS & PANELISTS

Ian White (Keynote and Panelist)

Ian White is a visual artist, curator, and educator who lives in Los Angeles and is the chief executive of The Charles White Archives. His artistic practice includes narrative murals, abstract sculpture, installations, and more. White was influenced by his father, Charles White, a significant figure in twentieth-century art and the community of artists, musicians, actors, and activists in which he was raised.
White wrote and illustrated Grandpa and the Library: How Charles White Learned to Paint, for The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and curated an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Life Model: Charles White and His Students. He was an assistant curator for Monumental Practice: Charles White at David Zwirner Gallery, New York, and Charles White — Leonardo da Vinci at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. He is developing a civic art intervention with the Los Angeles County Department of Parks & Recreation and Arts and Culture at Charles White Park in Altadena, CA.

11:30 AM – Panel One: Sounds of the Black Archive: Charles White’s Contributions to Film, Television, and Music Media

John Corbett (Moderator)

John Corbett is a writer, curator, and producer based in Chicago. He is co-owner of Corbett vs. Dempsey, an art gallery. Corbett is the author of several books, including Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein (Duke U. Press, 1994), Microgroove: Forays into Other Music (Duke, 2015), A Listener’s Guide to Free Improvisation (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium (Duke, 2017), and Pick Up the Pieces: Excursions in Seventies Music (University of Chicago, 2019). As an essayist and reviewer, Corbett has written for numerous academic and commercial publications, including DownBeat, The Wire, The Chicago Reader, The Chicago Tribune, NKA, Bomb, LitHub, and Lapham’s Quarterly. Corbett has edited or co-edited many books, including several on the musicians Sun Ra and Peter Brötzmann, as well as the 125 books and catalogs that his gallery, Corbett vs. Dempsey, has produced, and he has contributed to major museum monographs on artists including Jim Lutes, Charline Von Heyl, Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen, and Sadie Benning, and essays on artists Rachel Harrison for the Art Institute of Chicago and Bob Thompson for the Museum of Modern Art, NY.  Corbett’s work as a music producer includes his label, the Unheard Music Series, which existed from 1999-2006, and Corbett vs. Dempsey, an ongoing label issuing CDs of new and historical jazz, experimental music and improvised music.

Damon Locks (Panelist)

Damon Locks is a Chicago-based visual artist, educator, vocalist/musician. Since 2014 he has been working with the Prison and Neighborhood Arts Project at Stateville Correctional Center teaching art. He spent 4 years as an artist in residence as a part of the Museum of Contemporary Arts’ SPACE Program, introducing civically engaged art into the curriculum at Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy High School. He currently teaches Improvisation at The
School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Damon leads the Black Monument Ensemble, is a member of New Future City Radio, Exploding Star Orchestra and co-founded the band The Eternals.

Cauleen Smith (Panelist)

Cauleen Smith was raised in Sacramento, California and lives in Los Angeles. Smith is faculty in the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture. Smith holds a BA in Creative Arts from San Francisco State University and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Theater Film and Television. Smith’s short films, feature film, an installation and performance were work showcased at International Film Festival Rotterdam 2019. Smith has had solo exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art, MassMoCA and LACMA. Smith is the recipient of the following awards: Rockefeller Media Arts Award, Creative Capital Film / Video, Chicago 3Arts Grant, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Chicago Expo Artadia Award, and Rauschenberg Residency, Herb Alpert Awards in the Arts in Film and Video 2016, United States Artists Award 2017, 2016 inaugural recipient of the Ellsworth Kelly Award, 2020 recipient of the Studio Museum Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, and 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship.

12:30 PM – Lunch Conversation on Charles White and the SSCAC

LaMar Gayles Jr. (Presenter)

LaMar Gayles Jr. (a native son of the South Side of Chicago) is an archaeologist, independent curator, material culture scholar, and technical art historian and serves as Archive and Collections Manager at the South Side Community Art Center. Gayles’s research methodology combines archaeometry, arts-based research, conservation science, scientific instrumentation, art historical analysis, art-centered ethnography, historical reproduction, technical studies, and qualitative research to explore material and visual culture.

1:15 PM – Panel Two: Visual & Musical Composition: Inspiration, Collaboration,

& the Black Aesthetic

Travis A. Jackson (Moderator)

Travis A. Jackson is an Associate Professor of Music and Humanities at the University of Chicago. Jackson is an ethnomusicologist whose work centers on jazz, rock, and recording technology. His theoretical interests include urban geography, race/culture and identity, ethnographic method, performance and aesthetics. He is author of Blowin' the Blues Away: Performance and Meaning on the New York Jazz Scene (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012) as well as articles on topics ranging from the intersection of jazz and poetic performance to the interpretation of meaning in rock.

Gerald Clayton (Panelist)

Six-time GRAMMY nominated pianist-composer and Blue Note recording artist Gerald Clayton began formal studies at Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Piano Performance at USC’s Thornton School of Music under the instruction of Billy Childs, following a year of intensive study with NEA Jazz Master Kenny Barron at The Manhattan School of Music. In 2006, Clayton won second place in the Monk Institute of Jazz Piano Competition. In the years since, Clayton has collaborated with such distinctive artists as Diana Krall, Roy Hargrove, Dianne Reeves, Terence Blanchard, John Scofield, Terri Lyne Carrington, Peter Bernstein, Ambrose Akinmusire, Gretchen Parlato, Ben Wendel, the Clayton Brothers Quintet and legendary band leader Charles Lloyd. He currently serves as Director of Next Generation Jazz Orchestra and has served as Musical Director for Monterey Jazz Festival On Tour. Over the years, Clayton’s playing and original works have received GRAMMY recognition for Best Improvised Jazz Solo, Best Jazz Instrumental Composition and Best Jazz Instrumental Album — a nomination he earned most recently for his debut release on Blue Note Records Happening: Live at the Village Vanguard.

Angel Bat Dawid (Panelist)

Angel Bat Dawid is a Black American composer, clarinetist, and pianist, as well as a bandleader, educator, DJ, and producer. Her acclaimed debut album, released on International Anthem Recording Company *The Oracle* (2019), delves into contemporary Black experiences and has received widespread acclaim from outlets like Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and DownBeat Magazine. Known for her vibrant performances, she has created significant compositional works such as "Requiem for Jazz" and "Peace: A Suite for Yoko Ono’s Skylanding." Angel leads "Tha Brothahood," whose live album was highlighted in NPR Music's “Best Albums of 2020,” and she is also the bandleader for the women's group Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty. Bat Dawid was named “Chicagoan of the Year” in 2021 by The Chicago Tribune and recently received the USA Artists 2025 Fellowship.

Douglas R. Ewart (Panelist)

Douglas R. Ewart, Emeritus Professor, Adj. at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was born in Kingston, Jamaica. His life and work have always been inextricably associated with Jamaican culture, history, politics, and the land itself. Ewart immigrated in 1963 to Chicago, where he studied music theory at VanderCook College of Music, electronic music at Governors State University, and composition at the School of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (of which he later served as president from 1979 to 1987).
Ewart’s varied and highly interdisciplinary work encompasses music composition (including graphic and conceptual scores as well as conventionally notated works), painting and kinetic sound sculpture, and multi-instrumental performance on virtually the full range of saxophones, flutes, and woodwinds, including flutes, pan-pipes, rainsticks, and percussion instruments of his own design and construction.
His work as composer, instrument maker, and visual artist has long reflected his understanding of the importance of sustainable materials (particularly bamboo), which serve not only as primary physical materials for many of his sculptures and instruments, but also crucial conceptual elements of some of his most important recordings, such as Bamboo Meditations at Banff 1993 and Bamboo Forest 1988. His visual art and kinetic works have been shown at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Ojai Festival, Art Institute of Chicago, Institute for Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, and others.

2:30 PM – Panel Three: Figures in Music: Charles White’s Portraits

Melanie Herzog (Moderator)

Melanie Herzog is Professor Emerita of Art History at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a lecturer in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She holds an M.F.A. in ceramics and a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. With an emphasis on artists' encounters across cultural and geographical borders, socially engaged artistic practice, and intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and representation, she teaches, publishes, and lectures widely on art and visual culture of North America and the African diaspora.
Her publications include Elizabeth Catlett: An American Artist in Mexico (2000), Milton Rogovin: The Making of a Social Documentary Photographer (2006), and numerous essays, most recently “‘Thinking About Women’: Form, Substance, and Radical Politics,” in the companion publication for the exhibition Elizabeth Catlett: A Revolutionary Black Artist and All That It Implies, which opened in 2024 at the Brooklyn Museum and will travel to the National Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago in 2025. 

Benjamin L. Jones (Panelist)

Benjamin L. Jones (he/him) researches the speculative analysis and praxis of oppressed people. He arrives at The Ohio State University by way of graduate studies at Northwestern University’s Department of Art History, where he also earned an interdisciplinary cluster certificate in Critical Theory. A practicing artist, Jones graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute with a B.A. in the History and Theory of Contemporary Art (highest honors). His art-historical interests include contemporary intersections of art and power, futurism, and Black radical visual culture and performance.
Funded by the Social Science Research Council and the Mellon foundation, his work engages critical ethnic studies, critical pedagogical practices, and feminist mobilizations of onto-epistemology and quantum mechanics. He is currently at work on three concomitant book projects. The first to launch will be What We Cain't Do: The Pedagogy of the Black Radical Aesthetic Tradition, followed by What We Fin’na Do: Afterlives of the Underground Railroad in Art, and an art book published in pencil and mixed media titled What We Fin’na Do: Preface to a 5,000 Year Almanac. In Summer 2022 he was a facilitator for the Black Arts Movement School Modality, (Iteration 2, East Coast), alongside co-facilitators: Romi Crawford, Theaster Gates, Sampada Aranke, Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, Kamau Patton, Michael Simanga. In the 2022-23 academic year Jones was a Dissertation Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Department of Black Studies.

Tammy L. Kernodle (Panelist)

Dr. Tammy L. Kernodle is the Park Creative Arts Endowed Professor and University Distinguished Professor of Music at Miami University (OH). She is a recognized musician and scholar whose research focuses on African American music, gender studies in music, and race in American popular culture. Her scholarship has appeared in numerous journals, reference books, and anthologies, and has also appeared in numerous award-winning documentaries including Mary Lou Williams: The Lady Who Swings the Band, Girls in the Band, and Miles Davis: The Birth of Cool. Kernodle is the author of biography Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams, a comprehensive examination of the pianist/arranger’s six-decade career. She served as Associate Editor of the three-volume Encyclopedia of African American Music and as an Editor for the revision of the New Grove Encyclopedia of American Music. She currently serves on the Editorial Board for Grove Music Online, an online music encyclopedia that offers comprehensive coverage of music, musicians, music-making, and music scholarship. She has written for and consulted with The American Jazz Museum, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Walker Art Center, NPR, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, BBC, Smithsonian Folkways, and Carnegie Hall. Kernodle is the Past President of the Society for American Music and currently curates the I Dream a World Festival, multi-year initiative with New World Symphony that celebrates the legacy of Black composers.

Daniel Schulman (Panelist)

Daniel Schulman, Executive Director of Jewish Museum Milwaukee since May 2024, served as Director of Visual Art at the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events where he was responsible for exhibitions at the Chicago Cultural Center and directed the city’s Public Art Program from 2012 to 2018. He has over thirty years of curatorial experience at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was assistant and associate curator of modern and contemporary art from 1993 to 2004.
Schulman’s areas of scholarly and curatorial expertise include art in Europe and the U.S. from the late 19th century to the present. He specializes in African American art and art in Chicago and has published widely and curated dozens of exhibitions, including “A Century of Collecting: African American Art in the Art Institute of Chicago,” 2003, “Chicago Modern, 1893–1945: Pursuit of the New,” (Terra Museum of American Art, 2004), “A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund” (Spertus/Northwestern Press, 2009), and “African American Designers in Chicago: Art, Commerce, and the Politics of Race, 1900-1980” (Chicago Cultural Center, 2018/University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2025).
At the Chicago Cultural Center, Schulman curated or organized over 100 exhibitions between 2012 and 2024, including hundreds of Chicago-based contemporary artists in group and individual shows as well as historical exhibitions, such as "Keith Haring's Chicago Mural," "Richard Hunt: Sixty Years of Sculpture," "The Wall of Respect," "Eugene Eda's Doors for Malcolm X College," and dozens of group shows, residencies and community based projects and partnerships. Among the many nationally touring exhibitions Schulman has coordinated for DCASE include shows focusing on the work of Nina Chanel Abney, Hale Woodruff, Belkis Ayón, Robert Colescott, Pablo Helguera, Norman Lewis, Archibald Motley, Alexis Rockman and Horace Pippin.