Vic Brooks: Acoustic Legacies

Date: Wednesday September 18 at 6:30 PM

Location: Pratt Manhattan, 144 West 14th Street, 2nd Floor, Room 201, New York, NY 10011

Accessibility: American Sign Language Interpreting

Tickets: Free, open to the public, RSVP required 

About this Event: In this talk, Vic Brooks will trace a throughline across projects that play with the boundaries of their disciplinary frameworks, demanding new curatorial approaches and renewed attention to architectural contexts and their unheard legacies. During her eleven-year tenure at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC)—an institution designed for the production of time-based arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute—Brooks commissioned artworks and developed a series of projects that consider the acoustical properties of the sound stage, concert hall, and museum. She will focus on Shifting Center, a 2023 exhibition she co-curated at EMPAC with Nida Ghouse, and contextualizes this work through a discussion of two additional projects: Alexander Calder’s Acoustic Ceiling (1954) at the Central University of Venezuela’s Aula Magna, which is the subject of Brooks’ co-edited volume Tuning Calder’s Clouds (Athénée Press, 2025); and Clarissa Tossin’s Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ (2022), which traces a sonic lineage from pre-Columbian Maya wind instruments and Indigenous Guatemalan architecture to Maya Revival design and the contemporary concert hall.