IMAGE: Courtesy of Steve Parker. Photo: Brian Fitzsimmons

Foghorn Elegy

Experience a sunset performance on the shore of Lake Austin, alongside Steve Parker’s new sculpture Foghorn Elegy. A recent winner of the Rome Prize and Tito's Prize, Parker is an Austin artist, musician, and alumnus of our Crit Group program. Using handmade musical instruments, defunct maritime equipment, nautical wayfinding tools, and the natural landscape as inspiration, this performance will activate both his sculpture and its surrounding environment.
 

Foghorn Elegy will be performed by:

  • Brent Baldwin
  • Josh Balleza
  • Cameron Beauchamp
  • Tara Bhattacharya
  • Alexa Capareda
  • Alex Cruz
  • Verena Gaudy
  • Thor Harris
  • Mark McCoin
  • Pamela Martinez
  • Martín Rodriguez
  • Convergence Vocal Ensemble
  • The University of Texas at San Antonio Sousaphone & Euphonium Ensemble, directed by Gary Poffenbarger

Steve Parker is an artist, musician, and curator based in Austin, Texas. He is the recipient of the Rome Prize, the Ashurst Prize (UK), the Tito’s Prize, and a Fulbright, along with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Parker works with salvaged musical instruments, amateur choirs, marching bands, urban bat colonies, flocks of grackles, and pedicab fleets to investigate systems of control, interspecies behavior, and forgotten histories. His projects include elaborate civic rituals for humans, animals, and machines; listening sculptures modeled after obsolete surveillance tools; and cathartic transportation symphonies for operators of cars, pedicabs, and bicycles.

Parker has exhibited and performed at institutions, public spaces, and festivals internationally. Highlights include the Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, CUE Art Foundation (NY), the Fusebox Festival, the Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago), the Guggenheim Museum, the Lincoln Center Festival, Los Angeles Philharmonic inSIGHT, the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), MASS MoCA, Spoleto, SXSW, and Tanglewood. As a soloist and as an artist of NYC-based "new music dream team" Ensemble Signal, he has premiered more than 200 new works.