My Invitations to Listen exhibition at the Mulvane Art Museum includes one gallery almost entirely devoted to the September Scores, a series of thirty listening scores. Written every day over the course of a month, the scores offer text-based prompts for imagining how we might listen through writing, drawing, stitching, walking, and other actions.

Hung in two alternating rows, the scores make for quite a wall of text. As an art historian who often works in museums, I’ve known for years that reading in a gallery can be a challenge for many visitors. Or can feel off-putting, maybe. So if this exhibition is, in fact, to be an invitation to listen, then I knew I wanted to extend that invitation in multiple ways. The show includes opportunities to look and to walk, and for this part, I created a sound piece that plays in the gallery, so that viewers are able to simply hear and listen, whether reading along or just standing or sitting on a bench. I’m so grateful to my dear friend Deirdre for being willing to record the texts for the piece. For anyone not able to visit the show, you can listen to the piece on this Soundcloud link.

I’m also pretty happy with how the speakers and tiny computer look on a shelf adjacent to the prints.