The Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery is open to the Vanderbilt community with abbreviated hours, Tuesdays through Thursdays from 1 to 4pm. At this time, access is limited to Vanderbilt University students, faculty and staff, and all visitors must reserve timed tickets to attend in advance.
For those unable to visit in person please find a one-minute video tour of the exhibition, as well as a virtual Q&A with artist and composer, below.
WATCH Q&A WITH ARTIST AND COMPOSER
The Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery is pleased to present Dream for Light Years , a two-year collaboration between California-based painter Ali Smith and Blair School of Music professor of composition Michael Alec Rose.
Join us inside the Fine Arts Gallery for an exhibition of oil paintings by Ali Smith, along with a musical performance of a composition by Michael Alec Rose, made specifically with Smith’s large-scale canvases in mind. A quartet of distinguished faculty of the Blair School of Music performed Rose’s score, amidst paintings by Ali Smith: Molly Barth (flute), Stephen Miahky (violin), Jeremy Wilson (trombone) and Felix Wang (cello).
Visual artists and composers have long engaged in dynamic dialogues. The exchange of musical ideas and visual aesthetics were famously vibrant in the collaborations between Claude Monet and Claude Debussy, Wassily Kandinsky and Arnold Schoenberg and other artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The artist Ali Smith and composer Michael Alec Rose continue this conversation into a new millennium, allowing the Vanderbilt community and wider Nashville public a window into their process. We look forward to the opportunity to see and hear how one art form can give sustained attention to another, while attempting to translate not only the specific features, but also the essence of an artwork, from the language of one medium to another.
Michael Alec Rose is Professor of Composition at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music, and a composer of symphonic, chamber, piano, vocal, wind ensemble, ballet and theater music. From 2005 to 2016, he co-directed an international exchange program between Vanderbilt University and the Royal Academy of Music, London. Rose has composed eight string quartets, all premiered by distinguished ensembles, at venues including the Library of Congress, Tate St. Ives (Cornwall, England) and the Blanton Museum of Art (Austin, Texas).
Ali Smith paints vibrant, abstract compositions in oil on canvas whose forms suggest complex organic structures and imaginary landscapes. Her brightly colored and heavily textured networks of lines and forms constitute a personal language of motifs and shapes. Smith received her MFA from California State University, Long Beach (CA), and has since had solo exhibitions at Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami and Mark Moore Fine Art in Los Angeles. She has been included in numerous group shows, including those at the Laguna Art Museum and Riverside Museum in California. The artist lives and works in Long Beach, California.
Leonard Folgarait is Distinguished Professor of History of Art. His areas of teaching and research are the modern art of Latin America, with a specialization in the twentieth-century art of Mexico; and modern European and American art and architecture. Special interests are: the relationship of art to politics, early cubism, surrealism, performance art, film, photography, and historiography.
Q&A with Michael Alec Rose and Ali Smith, moderated by Leonard Folgarait on October 30, 2020:
A one-minute tour through Dream for Light Years: