Tel


Kamau Patton is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work examines history and culture through engagement with archives, documents, stories, and sites.

Artist Bio

Tel is a platform for performance, study, and contemplation that will question how the nature of memory has changed in relation to the encroachment of cyberspace, telematics, and transmission technologies. The project name refers to the archeological term for a mound formed by the accumulated remains left by communities occupying a site over time. Tel is experienced through a myriad of disciplines: past iterations have been presented as transmissions, walks, conversations, engagement with archives, and a publication series.


Discipline
Installation, Poetry
Award Year
2020
Status

In Progress


2021 Artist Retreat Presentation

An African American man with a microphone in hand wearing black glasses, a jaunty black hat and a fuzzy brown sweater, recites poetry.

Kamau Patton

Chicago, IL

Kamau Patton is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work examines history and culture through engagement with archives, documents, stories, and sites. Patton’s projects are dialogic and take form as expanded field conversations. Patton received his MFA from Stanford University in 2007 and received a degree in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. His work was shown in 2012 as part of Pacific Standard Time and in 2013 as part of the Machine Project Field guide to LA Architecture. Patton has completed projects in soundscape studies through support provided by the State University of New York at Buffalo, the Mellon Elemental Arts Initiative, and the Tang Teaching Museum. He presented research in 2016 at the ABF house in Stockholm, Sweden, as a part of The Shape of Co- to- Come symposium and exhibition. Patton participated in a series of performances as part of Projects 107: Lone Wolf Recital Corps at the Museum of Modern Art in August 2017. In September 2017, he installed an iteration of his ongoing project, Tel, at the Tang Museum. In 2019, Patton’s public art commission with the Bowman Montessori School in Palo Alto, CA, was open to the public. In 2020 Patton was an artist in residence at Coaxial Arts Foundation in Los Angeles. Utilizing recordings from the Sun Ra / El Saturn Collection, Patton created “The Past & Other Dreams”, a double cassette produced by the artist in collaboration with the Creative Audio Archive at ESS. A box set LP of Patton’s arrangements of Terry Adkins’s Lone Wolf Recital Corps Recitals, Second Mind and Alto Age, will be released in partnership with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in 2021.