Join the Moody and Spring 2022 artist resident Leslie Hewitt in dialogue with Alexandra Kieffer, Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, for stimulating conversation.

This in-person event, facilitated by Moody executive director Alison Weaver, will delve into Hewitt’s and Kieffer’s research and explore where music, perception, and visual art overlap.

About the Participants

The Moody’s spring Leslie and Brad Bucher artist-in-residence is Leslie Hewitt (b. 1977, New York, New York) whose recent research explores phenomenology, light, and sound. Through geometric compositions and spare assemblages of ordinary materials, Hewitt's work addresses both personal and sociopolitical histories. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, her work has been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, among others.

Alexandra Kieffer is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. Her book, Debussy’s Critics: Sound, Affect, and the Experience of Modernism, published by Oxford University Press in 2019, explores ideas about sensation, listening, and emotion in the reception of the music of Claude Debussy in the context of early twentieth-century scientific thought, especially developments in psychology and the physiology of sense perception. Her work on Debussy, Ravel, and early twentieth-century French musical culture has also appeared in numerous journals. Kieffer is currently exploring the relationship between music and secularity in modern thought, with a focus on the early twentieth-century social sciences.