HOUSTON, TX.- This spring, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston will present Black Light/White Noise: Sound and Light in Contemporary Art, the first comprehensive review of contemporary black artists working with sound and light, building on a longstanding tradition of artistic experimentation through the work of 16 diverse artists. Organized by Contemporary Arts Museum curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, Black Light/White Noise will be on view in Houston from May 26 to August 5, 2007.

The Museum will also present Perspectives 156: Impulse, a biennial exhibition curated and organized by members of the Museum’s Teen Council. Guest juror Francesca Fuchs, the painter whose latest museum exhibition, Perspectives 155, precedes the Teen Council’s show in the Zilkha Gallery, will select the works from submissions by Houston-area high school students. Perspectives 156: Impulse will be on view through July 8, 2007.

“The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is dedicated to discovering and presenting the newest and most exciting contemporary art, running the gamut from experimental practices and critically-acclaimed artists to the reflections of younger generations and unexplored talent,” said Contemporary Arts Museum Houston director Marti Mayo. “These two exhibitions reinforce our commitment to leading the vanguard of visual culture, both at home and abroad.”

Black Light/White Noise: Sound and Light in Contemporary Art - Black Light/White Noise presents the work of a new generation of artists who are working with sound and light not only as an audiovisual landscape, but also as an interactive form. It will include recent works by Sanford Biggers, Louis Cameron, Kianga Ford, Kira Lynn Harris, Sach Hoyt, Arthur Jafa, Jennie C. Jones, Yvette Mattern, Camille Norment, Kambui Olijimi, Karyn Olivier, Nadine Robinson, and SoundLab. The exhibition will also feature select canonical works by George Lewis (in collaboration with Douglas Ewat and Douglas Irving Repetto), Tom Lloyd, and Benjamin Patterson that place these 21st-century sound and light works in context with the history of the genre.

Artistic experimentation with “sons et lumières,” or sound and light, was first seen in the work of the Symbolists and Dadaists, who brought attention to the static but intangible nature of art, and later was used by Fluxus artists to inject time and performative aspects into their work. Their experimentations evolved into such contemporary disciplines as sound installation, kinetic sculpture, video installation, performance art, and interactive installation work. Black Light/White Noise will be the first exhibition to explore the contributions of black artists within the historical context of the sound and light aesthetic, blending them with the dynamics and sensibilities inherent in black art.

“As prolific as the use of sound and light in art has been over the past eighty years, we have rarely viewed this practice from a non-European perspective, and we know little about the many sound and light artists who come from diverse racial and cultural backgrounds,” said exhibition curator Valerie Cassel Oliver. “The expansion of the sound and light genre through a younger generation of black artists is remarkable, but has never been explored in depth. Black Light/White Noise reflects the innovation of these 16 artists working within this tradition.”

Recent works slated for the exhibition include Arthur Jafa’s My Black Death (2003-2006), an installation with modern jazz blasting forth from a Trans-Am in a darkened room; Sach Hoyt’s 8-Track Shack (2006), a six-foot-high structure housing the artist’s library of vintage 8-track cartridges; and Kianga Ford’s The Complex (2005), an arrangement of cozy plastic pods with listening stations offering readings of her original fiction. The exhibition will also feature Nadine Robinson’s Wormwood (2005), an installation of more than 500 light bulbs arranged to form a seven-pointed star; Karyn Olivier’s Whispering Domes (2004), featuring domed sculptural spaces that amplify and alter the voices of visitors; and Camille Norment’s Driftglass (2001-2004), a full-length mirror with audio that varies depending on viewers’ proximity to the piece. Black Light/White Noise will be accompanied by a catalogue published by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston reflecting the exhibition’s unconventional subject matter. The publication will include essays by Cassel Oliver, curator of the exhibition; Romi Crawford, director of education and public programs at the Studio Museum of Harlem; and Greg Tate, composer, musician, playwright, and contributor to The Village Voice. It will also contain extensive photographic and audio documentation on each light and sound installation, a DVD with reproductions of the nonstatic work, as well as biographical and bibliographical information on each artist.