David Greenberger and Tyson Rogers Present ‘How Vowels Endure Winter’

SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY (March 21, 2024) — The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College announces the world premiere of David Greenberger and Tyson Rogers’s How Vowels Endure Winter on Friday, April 12, at 7 pm. The event is the inaugural commission and performance in the Adirondack Trust New Works Series at the Tang Museum.

How Vowels Endure Winter features a series of monologues with piano created in response to work by the artist Joachim Schmid that occupies an entire wall in the Tang exhibition Studio/Archive. Schmid organizes photographs he finds at flea markets, in magazines, and on postcard racks, and assembles them into related groups, such as six photos smiling women with eyes closed, nine images of a camel before a pyramid, or 21 brides and grooms posed in front of the same dark-red curtain. Schmid reveals patterns of use and meaning that point to social rituals, human desires, domestic events, economic conditions, and how photography functions in our daily life.

Greenberger and Rogers’s new compositions for voice and piano respond to Schmid’s works with short tales about collecting, creating, organizing, and memory. Greenberger, who lives and works in Greenwich, Washington County, is known for audio works and performances based on conversations with nursing home residents. His drawings and compositions were featured in the 2014 Tang exhibition David Greenberger: One Upon, which included a one-seat theater in which Greenberger and his band A Strong Dog performed one two-minute composition for one audience member at a time.

Greenberger has worked with numerous musicians over the years, including Rogers, who plays keyboards. Rogers first worked with Greenberger in 2013 as part of the group Prime Lens. Greenberger and Prime Lens have released three albums, My Thoughts Approximately (2017), It Happened To Me (2018), and Good Perspective (2020), which Chronogram hailed as “smart, caring, [and] inquisitive.”

The event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact the Tang Visitors Services Desk at 518-580-8080 or visit https://tang.skidmore.edu.

About the Musicians

For the past thirty years David Greenberger has created commissioned works for museums, universities, performing arts venues, and National Public Radio. These performances grew out of The Duplex Planet, the publication he started in 1979 based on his conversations with nursing home residents. The Duplex Planet has been collected into books, adapted into a comic book series, and a traveling exhibition. His recordings and performances of monologues with music have been created in collaboration with a wide range of musicians and ensembles. Throughout his career he has also been a visual and conceptual artist. These practices predate a degree in painting from Massachusetts College of Art (BFA, 1978). A documentary film by Beth Harrington about Greenberger, Beyond the Duplex Planet, is due for release later in 2024.

Pitchfork called Tyson Rogers a “wayfaring keyboard wrangler” for his multi-faceted abilities as a recording and touring musician. Rogers toured extensively with bluesman Tony Joe White and country legend Don Williams, playing on his Grammy-nominated duet with Alison Krauss, “I Just Come Here for the Music.” Rogers’s original music has been featured by National Geographic, Tokyo Olympics, CBS television, The North Face, and Tom’s Shoes, and his recordings have received critical acclaim from music critics, earning “Best CDs of the Year” by Downbeat and others.

About the Adirondack Trust New Works Series at the Tang Museum

The Adirondack Trust New Works Series at the Tang Museum is supported by a generous gift to Skidmore College from the Adirondack Trust Company. This annual series will present a world premiere commission in art, music, dance, or poetry at the Museum. Performances will be free and open to the public.

About the Tang Teaching Museum

The Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College is a pioneer of interdisciplinary exploration and learning. A cultural anchor of New York’s Capital Region, the Tang’s approach has become a model for college and university art museums across the country—with exhibition programs that bring together visual and performing arts with interdisciplinary ideas from history, economics, biology, dance, and physics, to name just a few. The Tang has one of the most rigorous faculty-engagement initiatives in the nation, and a robust publication and touring exhibition program that extends the museum’s reach far beyond its walls. The Tang Teaching Museum’s award-winning building, designed by architect Antoine Predock, serves as a visual metaphor for the convergence of art and ideas. The Museum is open to the public Tuesday–Sunday, noon–5 pm, with extended hours until 9 pm Thursday. https://tang.skidmore.edu