In Spring ’24 I had a student working on a research project about music/culture in camps where Japanese Americans had been imprisoned during WWII. I put him in touch with my friend, LA sound artist Alan Nakagawa, who has done extensive archival and art making in Southern California related to this topic. Turns out the student was a member of a campus group called CWRU’s Tsunagari Japan and thought it’d be cool to invite Nakagawa to give a talk. Six months later and a million emails and applications later and we’ve got three events happening (October 9-11) with Nakagawa in Cleveland!
Alan’s brilliant. I’ve been learning from him and his work since around 2013 since we first met at the wulf. A lot of his sound work is collage oriented, making new worlds of field recordings and found sounds. I’m convinced there’s much to be learned from being still and just listening and I’m stoked to have organized these events:
“Thinking Sound, Archives, and Identities: Close Listening with Alan Nakagawa”
Listening is a feeling is a knowing. These ideas lead to one another with a kind of naivety that may underpin larger inquiries and profound revelations. And they’re the ideas that animate the work of multimedia artist and researcher, Alan Nakagawa. Presently the artist-in-residence at the Gerth Archives at CalState University Dominguez Hills, CA as well as USC’s Kaya press, Nakagawa has a knack for following obscured traces. Conceiving and executing ingenious embodied sound and visual art experiences, he offers us opportunities to meet ourselves anew in hidden histories, making new sense out of trails gone cold.
A first-generation Japanese-American artist, Nakagawa will bring his work, “Peace Resonance: Hiroshima/Wendover” to the Ames Family Atrium of the Cleveland Museum of art on the evening of Wednseday, October 9, 2024. Having previously presented this work at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum of Art, Orange County Museum of Art, and the Japanese American National Museum, this free and public experience invites the listener to sonically inhabit several places at once: simultaneously presencing the recorded “silent” room-tone of both the Hiroshima Atomic Dome and the Wendover Hangar that housed the B-29 bomber that delivered the devastating atomic bomb to that city. This piece is a unique opportunity to imaginatively be-with the past, dream a future, and consider one’s place in it.
Nakagawa will offer a free sound walk and public lecture demonstration related to his research and sound activities on Thursday, October 10. In conversation with Dr. AJ Kluth of the CWRU Department of Music, Nakagawa will map connections of his multiple oral history and archival projects to his artistic output. The talk will detail how thoughtful and speculative engagements with our individual and collective pasts might help us better understand our identities in the present, recommending vision and action for more just futures. On Friday, October 11, he’ll give a keynote address for Tsunagari Japan based on his archival and art practices related WWII Japanese Internment/Imprisonment Camps; 6-8 pm in Thwing Student Center’s Excelsior Ballroom, free.
Artist Bio: Alan Nakagawa is an interdisciplinary artist with archiving tendencies, primarily working with sound, often incorporating various media and working with communities and their histories. He has created a series of Invisible Architecture experiences that are mash ups of the recorded acoustics of historical sites, giving new context to historic places through a contemporary lens of sound. Nakagawa is currently the Artist-in-residence for two institutions. 1) Kaya Press at the University of Southern California, a small literary publication focusing on Asian and Pacific Islander American and Diasporic literature celebrating its 30th Anniversary and 2) the Gerth Archives, California State University Dominguez Hills assigned to the National Coalition for Redress and Reparations collections, which consists of materials pertaining to the campaign that led to the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. His first book, “A.I.R.Head: Anatomy of an Artist in Residence” was published in January 2023 by Writ-Large Press. It maps his artistic trajectory that led to his nine Artist-in-residencies in six years.
Many thanks to the Department of Music, The Baker-Nord Center for Humanities, and Tsunagari Japan for co-sponsoring this artist visit – AND Gabe Pollack at the CMA who works hard to say yes to my silly ideas!
AJ Kluth 