B. 1971, Los Angeles
Lives in Los Angeles

Venue

The Historic New Orleans Collection
Historic French Quarter Galleries
520 Royal Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday, closed
Tuesday–Saturday, 9:30 AM–4:30 PM
Sunday, 10:30 AM–4:30 PM

Neighborhood

French Quarter

About the project

Over and Over the Waves

This installation is inspired by the 1884 visit of Encarnación Payen’s 8th Cavalry Mexican Military Band to New Orleans for the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition. A massive seventy-six-member band, they played Afro-Cuban danzones and European waltzes and polkas throughout the city. The music of “The Mexican Band,” as they came to be known, seeped into the local repertoires of New Orleans bands and the catalogs of local sheet music publishers, and became one more chapter in the city’s larger history of musical and cultural encounter rooted in the music of the African diaspora and the afterlives of enslavement. Linked to their popularity, other Mexican ensembles and subsequent iterations of the original band performed in the area throughout the years following the exposition.

Archival objects are paired here with an original sound piece that joins the musical worlds of nineteenth- and early-twentieth century New Orleans to contemporary histories of migration to New Orleans and greater Louisiana. The sound installation is meant to be experienced in dialogue with the historical materials on display.

The band’s original repertoire has also been given to a group of New Orleans musicians whose backgrounds connect to Honduras, Ghana, Cuba, Morocco, and Black America. They will reinterpret the nineteenth-century songs for twenty-first century ears across a series of live performances.

about the artist

Josh Kun is an author, curator, and cultural historian based in Los Angeles. His studies and practice focus on the intersection of culture and politics in popular music. After dissecting the elements of music’s cultural past, he reassembles them into a narrative shaping their contributions to current and future geographical and cultural identities. He has curated exhibitions and led artist projects with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles; The Getty Foundation, Los Angeles; Grammy Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles Public Library; and the Santa Monica Museum of Art (now the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). His commissioned collaborations with musicians include projects with Nicole Mitchell, Guillermo Galindo, Ozomatli, and J. Period. Kun has been the recipient of the Berlin Prize from the American Academy of Berlin (2018) and a MacArthur Fellowship (2016). Kun is a professor of communication and journalism at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He received a BA in literature from Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, and a PhD in ethnic studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

Josh Kun, Over and Over the Waves, 2021. Multi-media installation with sound, dimensions variable. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. The Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Jose Cotto

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