A major show in the works at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston may not be much to look at, but listen closely. In 2017, the museum plans to present sound works by eight artists in the exhibition Sound and the City.
The Taiwanese artist Lee Mingwei, the Luxembourg-based artist Su-Mei Tse and the US composer David Grubbs, among others, will create works for the Gardner’s galleries, gardens and a nearby train station.
Ernst Karel, the manager of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University, and Teri Rueb are working on a GPS-activated sound piece that visitors can download onto their phones. The project “will confront the visitor with a new way of experiencing space”, says Anne Hawley, the museum’s former director.