Beverly Glenn-Copeland
Multimedia artist Wu Tsang has unveiled a new work, called Anthem, in collaboration with Beverly Glenn-Copeland, at the Guggenheim.
Beverly Glenn-Copeland's Keyboard Fantasies is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year, and following the announcement of a companion covers collection, the artist will be now be honoured with an exhibit at New York's Guggenheim museum — featuring an 84-foot likeness of himself.
New exhibition Anthem, from filmmaker, artist and perform Wu Tsang, will feature Glenn-Copeland as "an immense, eighty-four-foot curtain sculpture," the centrepiece of what the artist calls a "sonic sculptural space" created in the museum's rotunda.
Opening July 2021, Anthem will see a Tsang-created "film-portrait" of Glenn-Copeland projected onto the massive curtain, improvising and singing passages of his music in addition to a rendition of his song "Deep River," a version of which listeners will recall from last year's Transmissions.
Tsang also worked with Kelsey Lu and producer Asma Maroof to create an additional soundscape of other voices and noises inspired by Glenn-Copeland's voice, allowing exhibition viewers further sonic exploration through simply traveling the museum's circular ramp.
"The title of this exhibition, Anthem, draws from lesser-known histories of the word, which then meant antiphon, a style of call-and-response singing associated with music as a spiritual practice," Guggenheim assistant curator X Zhu-Nowell writes in an abstract.
"Unlike a conventional anthem, which amplifies the power of a song through loudness and uniform sound, this installation enhances the call of Glenn-Copeland's voice by combining it with ambiguous vocal timbres, changing tints of ambient sound, and other heterogeneous sonic and visual textures."
