Stephen Vitiello recording in a forest in Virginia.

Dogs in the Yard, Birds Overhead

Stephen Vitiello’s sound installations, sculptural works, DVDs and photographs have been exhibited widely at such spaces as The Project and the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York City; The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas; Galerie Almine Rech in Paris; and Hallwalls in Buffalo, New York.

Artist Bio

Dogs in the Yard, Birds Overhead is both a series of sculptural sound installations and a stereo CD. Vitiello captures field recordings from several sites in Virginia as a way to investigate the way divergent soundscapes, such as a countryside and a city, can affect each other and change the listener’s experience of each. Using his home as an example of such an intersection, Vitiello records the sounds of wildlife, NASCAR races, the James River and gunfire, focusing them into two six-channel environments designed for a specific gallery.

Discipline
Installation, Sound Art
Award Year
2006
Status

Completed

Themes
From the Journal

What happens after an artist receives a Creative Capital Award? What happens after their Creative Capital project goes out into the world? To get a sense of how artists use the organization’s resources to their advantage, I reached out to Stephen Vitiello, a vanguard in the world of sound art, who received a Creative Capital Award for his project Dogs in the Yard, Birds Overhead. The project pits divergent soundscapes from the city and countryside against one another, and it premiered in 2007 at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art.

I asked Vitiello how receiving the Creative Capital Award in 2006 was helpful in his career. He told me it came at just the right moment for him: “The funding was so important, and it came at a point where I had moved away from New York and was wondering if support and opportunities would decrease. In fact, they increased.”

August 1, 2018
Stephen Vitiello

Stephen Vitiello

Richmond, VA

Stephen Vitiello’s sound installations, sculptural works, DVDs and photographs have been exhibited widely at such spaces as The Project and the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York City; The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas; Galerie Almine Rech in Paris; and Hallwalls in Buffalo, New York. Vitiello has performed at The Tate Modern in London, England; The San Francisco Electronic Music Festival; and per/Son in Cologne, Germany. He has directed the videos Nam June Paik: SeOUL NyMAx Performance and Light Readings, among others, and produced an audio CD Nam June Paik, Works 1958-1979 on Sub Rosa Records. Vitiello is on the faculty of kinetic imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University.

From the Journal