The Estate of Milford Graves: Heart Harmonics: sound, energy, and natural healing phenomena

Fridman Gallery is honored to present a solo exhibition of the late free jazz percussionist and visual artist Milford Graves.

Heart Harmonics: sound, energy, and natural healing phenomena brings together three bodies of work comprising the most recent (and last) artistic output of his research.

A set of four hand-painted wind gongs will resonate throughout the gallery, activated by the sounds of Graves’ unreleased Heart Music recordings. The artist spent nearly 40 years establishing a healing correlation between the vibrations of percussive instruments and the rhythms of the human heart, which he termed “biological music, a synthesis of the physical and mental, a mind-body deal.” These works not only represent his scientifically recognized research, but also the deep, artistic connection he shared with his wife Lois who has painted two of the gongs in the exhibition as a tribute to her late husband and his work.

The exhibition will also feature a series of recent works that explore sound vibration as a painting technique. This process involved placing palettes of paint between black vinyl covers and attaching to the outside of the covers a transducer playing unreleased, intimate recordings of instrumental experiments. Graves would slide the transducer around the surface, like a brush along a drum skin, causing the paint to blend into organic shapes and natural patterns.

In the downstairs media room, the gallery will present a four-channel audio-video installation of Graves’ Labview Animations based on electrocardiogram recordings made in his basement laboratory, where he studied the intricate melodies generated by the human heartbeat. Graves customized software that recorded the voltages produced by the electrical pulses of the heart, capturing the frequencies at which the heart vibrates. These frequencies could then be translated into the audible spectrum and analyzed as sound and melody, which he called Heart Music.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a program of events, and a catalog with essays by Rhea L. Combs and Niama Safia Sandy.