Join us Sunday afternoons, 1:30 – 4pm for Sundays on the Lawn, a new outdoor program featuring internationally renowned bands and musicians, plus free art making classes and lawn games. Bring your friends and families for an afternoon on the museum’s lawn. Grab a picnic from the cafe and enjoy a stellar line-up of bands organized around the theme of call and response and calls to action by guest curator Ariana Hellerman. Art making classes and lawn games start at 1:30pm, music performances start at 3pm.

*In case of rain, all programs will take place inside the museum!

BAND: Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto 

Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto has been the most important gaita and traditional cumbia ensemble in Colombia since the mid-1950s. The fact that the group has persisted and includes several generations of musicians speaks to the vitality of this tradition. Gaita is a term used to name a Colombian musical instrument, various musical genres, and an ensemble (the conjunto de gaitas), all from the Caribbean region of Colombia, from where much commercially available Colombian traditional and popular music comes. Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto won the Latin Grammy for Best Traditional Album with Un Fuego de Sangre Pura, which evokes the current difficult and painful times in the region of Montes de María, the home of many of the musicians on this recording. This region was one of the most affected by Colombia’s armed conflict, which resulted in mined fields and displaced populations. Violence, economic hardship, and the impossibility of doing agricultural work on mined land make it increasingly difficult for this music to be played in the region. Similarly, it is difficult to make the gaitas, since the plant from which they are made, cardón, grows close some of the most remote and dangerous areas.  It is a tribute to the courage of their people and to the endurance of their music in the midst of forced displacement and war.

More about:

CALLS:

CALL and response

CALL to action

Call and Response is a form of interaction in which the speaker’s statements (“calls”) are punctuated by direct commentary from the audience. In music, it is a technique where one musician offers a phrase and a second player responds. The musicians build on each other’s offerings and move the song forward, collectively. Forms of call and response music are widely present in parts of the world touched by the trans-Atlantic slave trade and in this country, can be seen in the most famous of African-American music genres including gospel, blues, soul, R&B, and hip hop. Often times, the lyrics reflect the social struggles experienced.

A Call To Action is an instruction to an audience, designed to provoke an immediate response. Calls to Action have inspired radical collaborations that call for change, whether for peace, the end of war, community formation, or political resistance.

Artist’s Calls to Action have inspired songs that become protest anthems, fighting issues of injustice, including institutional racism, income inequality, and war. In the United States, Sam Cooke penned the Civil Rights masterpiece “A Change Is Gonna Come;”  folk and mainstream artists like Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, helped to create the soundtrack to the anti-war movement during Vietnam.

In many ways, both Call and Response music and musician’s Calls to Action relate to civic life and the struggle for social justice. Call and Response is often a pervasive pattern of democratic participation— used in public gatherings, in the discussion of civic affairs, and in religious rituals – it ensures that all voices are heard and that all issues are addressed. Politically, social Calls to Action are usually sparked when something has gone awry; it signals an alarm for change.

In this series, we have engaged artists from different parts of the world, whose music shines light onto one of the two Calls. “Call and Response” music and musical “Calls to Action” are quite similar in that they both tell interactive stories and are both dependent on a collective experience.  In these dire political times, we are in need of dialogue and each other.

– statement by Ariana Hellerman