On Drawing: Scores for Elsewhere: Experiments in Sound, Line, and Consciousness

Collaborating through drawings, music, voice, and text, Houston-based musician and composer Li(sa E.) Harris and writer, artist, and current Menil Drawing Institute Research Fellow Renee Gladman, explore the score as a conduit or intermediary between the known and the unknown, between the visible and the non-visible.
This event features Harris’ debut of a composition for voice and Theremin based on a selection of Gladman’s score drawings and a conversation between the artists follows the performance.
About the speakers:
Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of writing, drawing and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, as well as three collections of drawings: "Prose Architectures" (2017), "One Long Black Sentence," a series of white ink drawings on black paper, indexed by Fred Moten (2020), and "Plans for Sentences" (2022). Since 2017, she has exhibited her works on paper in galleries in the U.S. and across Europe. Her first solo show "The Dreams of Sentences" opened at Wesleyan University’s Zilkha Gallery in September 2022, followed by "Narratives of Magnitude" at Artists Space in 2023. Recent essays and visual work have appeared in "POETRY" Magazine, "The Paris Review," "Gulf Coast," "Granta," "Harper’s," "BOMB" magazine, "e-flux" and "n+1." She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), and won a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize in fiction. Currently, Gladman is a 2023 research fellow at the Menil Drawing Institute, where she is studying scores and portals.
Li(sa E.) Harris is an independent and interdisciplinary artist, creative soprano, performer, composer, improvisor, filmmaker, writer, singer/songwriter researcher, and educator from Houston Texas. Li’s work focuses on the energetic relationships between body, land, spirit and place. She uses voice, theremin, electronics, movement, improvisation, meditation and new media to explore healing in performance and living. In 2007, Li founded Studio Enertia, a creative arts studio focused on developing original works, experiences and environments that promote more fun, freedom, and well-being into our world. She received a master’s degree in vocal performance from the Manhattan School of Music in 2004, and a Deep Listening® Certification from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2017. Li has performed and participated in exhibitions at Carnegie Hall (2023), Blaffer Art Museum (2022), Moody Center for the Arts (2021), and Redline Arts (2021). She is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2022), Brown Foundation Inaugural Affiliate Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2021), and Dorothea Tanning Award for Music/Sound from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2021). She has participated in residencies, including the Hermitage Artist Retreat (2021), South Arts Jazz Road Creative Residency (2021), Ballroom Sessions-The Farther Place (2021), and A Studio in the Woods (2021).
About the series:
"On Drawing" is an initiative of the Menil Drawing Institute. Each year, several programs address topics ranging from the history, theory, criticism, and materiality of drawing. Leading academics, curators, and experts in the field are invited to participate alongside Menil curators and conservators.
As always, Menil programs are free and open to all.
Visit menil.org/events to learn more about upcoming programs.
Public Program of The Menil Collection, Houston, TX. November 30, 2023.