Date:
April 23, 2026, 6:00 – 9:00pm
Location:
Recess
Join us for an indoor "cook-out" and conversation with cellists Zeelie Brown and Jeffrey Zeigler—exploring the relationships between music, land, and inherited traditions of sound.
Guests are invited to share a homestyle meal—featuring Black Southern dishes like greens and butter beans—before gathering for a conversation.
The evening will include reflections on musical lineage, the cello’s place within classical and experimental traditions, and the ways artists reinterpret inherited forms. Through conversation, listening, and live musical examples, the program offers insight into the creative processes shaping Brown’s evolving installation and the sonata that will premiere at the close of the exhibition.
Food will be served throughout the evening, with time for informal conversation before and after the program.
Zeelie Brown
Zeelie Brown is a cellist, composer, multimedia artist, farmer, and chef. Their first art museum was the loblolly pine woods in coastal Alabama and the limestone walls of San Antonio. Their work investigates the vernacular cultures and ecologies of the Black Gulf and Global South as a means of overcoming the plantation to petroleum legacies of genocidal white greed that threaten to drown our world. They studied Black performance, jazz cello and Black vernacular art at Oberlin College. They have been a Create Change Fellow with the Laundromat Project, a Forge Fellow, a Climate Rising fellow at A Studio in the Woods, a FARMS apprentice at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, an apprentice butcher at Fleishers, and Transjustice Community Fellow at the Audre Lorde Project. They've lectured at MIT, Tulane, Harvard, York University, Beam Camp, and the University of Southern Illinois. They have performed at CACNO, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, El Museo Del Barrio, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, and The Caribbean Cultural Center and Afro-Diasporic Institute. They've mounted exhibitions at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Harvestworks, Elsewhere Museum, and Flux Factory and have been supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Jerome Foundation, and Franklin Furnace.
Jeffrey Zeigler
Cellist and multidisciplinary artist Jeffrey Zeigler has established himself as one of the most innovative and versatile musicians of our time, with a body of work that spans across different genres, themes, and formats, from solo to opera to chamber and interdisciplinary collaborations. Artistically beyond categorization and fiercely independent, Strings Magazine hailed Zeigler as “widely known for pushing boundaries and breaking conventions,” while The New York Times praised his playing as “fiery... with unforced simplicity and beauty of tone.” Deeply committed to the creation of new works, he has commissioned dozens of works and has collaborated with many of the leading artists and innovators such as Laurie Anderson, John Corigliano, Bryce Dessner (of The National), Philip Glass, Hauschka, Magos Herrera, Glenn Kotche (of Wilco), Yo-Yo Ma, Dai Matsuoka (of Sankai Juku) Siddhartha Mukherjee, Paola Prestini, Terry Riley, Carl Hancock Rux, Foday Musa Suso, Tanya Tagaq, and John Zorn.
As a member of the internationally renowned Kronos Quartet from 2005-2013, he is the recipient of the Avery Fisher Prize, the Polar Music Prize, the President’s Merit Award from NARAS (who present the GRAMMYTM Awards), the Richard Bogomolny National Service Award from Chamber Music America, and The Asia Society's Cultural Achievement Award.