Brian Slattery photos
Awilda Sterling-Duprey in "...blindfolded" ...
... soundtracked live by Jesse Hameen II, Morris Trent, and Johnathan Moore, at NXTHVN.
In the large common area at NXTHVN on Henry Street, a temporary, two-segment wall was erected, mounted with black paper. Artist Awilda Sterling-Duprey moved in that small space, a blindfold over her eyes, large pastels in her hands — improvisational jazz helping guide her way, during the last weekend of New Haven Open Studios.
The music came from all around Sterling-Duprey.
On the other side of one segment, three musicians, playing bass, drums, and cello. On the other side of the other segment, three more musicians playing keyboard, barril, and saxophone. The two groups of musicians couldn’t see each other at all, and Sterling-Duprey couldn’t see anything.
But together, they made art.
The scene on Saturday was a public performance of Sterling-Duprey — NXTHVN’s first visiting artist — entitled “…blindfolded,” a series of works in which “she blindfolds herself and makes abstract marks on papers in response to a musical score,” as the advertisement for the show stated. “Sterling-Duprey will be in dialogue with local New Haven and CT-based musicians providing improvisational sounds that draw from jazz and Caribbean influences. She will allow her body to feel and translate the music into rhythmic bodily movements articulated into bright pastel markings, lines, and textures onto black construction paper.”
The performance was wrapped into the programming for the final weekend of New Haven Open Studios, which held a few concurrent events in Westville, from studio visits to gallery shows. As it turned out, “…blindfolded” was an apt encapsulation of a month of visual art activity in the Elm City.
The band performing with Sterling-Duprey included Jesse Hameen II on drums, Johnathan Moore on cello, Morris Trent on bass, Nelson Bello on barril, Michael Carambello on keyboards, and Stephen Gritz King on saxophone, and as Hameen elucidated afterward, the performance was an exercise in listening hard and following intuitions.
“I’ve been performing as a professional since 1951 and [this] is my first experience like this,” he said of the integration of art and music through improvisation. He explained that the group had three rehearsals scheduled. “At the first rehearsal, Awilda explained to us who she is,” Hameen said.
Born in Barrio Obrero, Santurce, Puerto Rico, Sterling-Duprey got a formal education in visual art through the Escuela de Artes Plásticas, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, the School of Visual Arts in New York, and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. At the same time, she is an acclaimed experimental dancer. She helped found Pisotón, the first experimental dance collective in Puerto Rico. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Caribbean Cultural Contribution Award from the Puerto Rican Cultural Institute, and several other awards. Her past performances, which mix the experimental with Afro-Caribbean dance and jazz, have taken her all over the world.
Michael Carambello, Nelson Bello, and Stephen Gritz King.
“The second rehearsal was for the band to rehearse together, because we’d never played together as a unit before,” Hameen said. Sterling-Duprey told them not to worry about what she was doing. Hameen reassured her that wouldn’t be a problem, as they would just watch her movements. Sterling-Duprey corrected her.
“You won’t see me,” she said.
“What do you mean, we won’t see you?” Hameen said. Then “I said, ‘will you come to rehearsal?’ She said, ‘no!’ ” Then, Hameen said, “I found out some of the musicians weren’t going to see each other” either.
Sterling-Duprey explained that she wasn’t worried either. She had done several performances in the past, often to recorded music. The prospect of performing with live musicians she didn’t know was thrilling. “Jazz is spirit,” she said, “and I wanted to keep on in that spirit.” Working with NXTHVN, and in the collaboration with the musicians, she said, “I found joy.”
In the performance, as the blindfolded Sterling-Duprey found her bearings in her space, the two drummers played to one another from either side. Morris fell in on bass, and the rhythm section quickly found a deep groove, its roots in the Caribbean and beyond. Sterling-Duprey made her first marks, bold yellow lines, drawn with a sure hand. The musicians kept developing their idea; for a minute all of them used their instruments as percussion. Then, as if receiving a signal from somewhere, they sped up, into a hard-hitting rhythm, drums, cello and bass working in tight concert, saxophone and keys sailing over the top. Sterling-Duprey’s moved with ease in her space, her shapes becoming more elaborate.
Without any sight lines, the communication among all the performers was happening in more concentrated ways. As the rhythm section persisted, Gritz King and Carambello entered into a call and response. The music became more exploratory, about changing textures and morphing melodic ideas. Sterling-Duprey was now dancing, the shapes she was making echoing the sounds in the air. Hameen and Bello shared a rapturous minute of percussive conversation.
All the performers smiled the whole time. Only the audience could see the whole piece and its overall effect. But Sterling-Duprey and the musicians moved and played as if they could, too.
The performance provided a rich context for the exhibition of Sterling-Duprey’s works in the NXTHVN’s gallery, “Aesthetics of Dis-Order,” running through Nov. 24. As an accompanying note states, the show “presents a selection of abstract artworks … showcasing her research of the art form from the 1970s to today” in a practice “challenging conventional notions of culture, national and gendered boundaries.”
Paintings, drawings, and mixed media are presented along with newspaper clippings and other ephemera from Sterling-Duprey’s career, though because they are “placed in a nonlinear and nonsequential order,” it’s possible to understand her practice as “an intuitive and electric corporeal response; we see her inspired movement in marked glimpses and trace within each of the individual artworks.”
Without a sense of chronology, the exhibition foils an attempt to talk about artistic development over time with any real substance. But that’s part of the point. Why impose a straight line, time’s arrow, when there are none to speak of in the works? Freed from chronology, it’s possible instead to talk more fundamentally about change. It doesn’t matter in what direction those changes occurred, or how long they took. Was it decades or a day? What matters is the sense of an artist on the move, never doing quite the same thing twice, unafraid of leaving past successes behind and concentrating instead on what’s happening now.
In that sentiment — and the way Saturday’s performance made disparate parts come together to make a complete whole — Sterling-Duprey’s work felt like a microcosm of what Open Studios had been for the month in New Haven. No one could have seen everything that happened, from West Haven to Marlin Works to Erector Square to Westville (try as we might). But in each piece, people felt the larger collective effort. Artists knew and felt they were all working together.
It thus made all the sense in the world that when Sterling-Duprey removed her blindfold after she finished painting, and the audience applauded, she clapped for the audience as well. Everyone involved — artists and audience — had made the piece what it was. Meanwhile, the musicians kept playing. The art kept going.