September 5 – Performance by Laura Ortman
Friday, September 5, 2025 | 6:30 pm | 516 Arts | Sliding Scale Ticketing | RSVP Required
Composer and musician Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) will present a newly commissioned performance developed in response to Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts. Known for creating layered and dynamic soundscapes, Ortman draws on violin, voice, and experimental instrumentation. Her performance will reflect the exhibition’s guiding questions around scores as calls for decolonization, and the ways sound can activate land, history, and collective presence. By bringing together improvisation, resonance, and movement between musical discourse, Ortman’s new work expands the exhibition’s exploration of sound as a transformative and relational practice.
This performance is part of the exhibition Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts. RSVP here.
About the artist: A member of the White Mountain Apache tribe, Laura Ortman is a musician and composer who creates across multiple platforms, including albums, live performance, field recordings, and video works. As a soloist, Ortman performs on amplified and Apache violin, vocals, piano, electric guitar, and keyboard.
She has performed and presented work nationally and internationally at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2021); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2019); the imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival, Toronto, Canada (2017, 2011); Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Montréal, Canada (2017); and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2009).
Ortman is the recipient of the United States Artists Fellowship (2022); a Jerome Foundation, Jerome at Camargo Residency (2020); the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, National Artist Fellowship (2016); and a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency (2014).