Gallery Talk: NEA Jazz Master Marilyn Crispell on Cy Twombly

In the first half of a two-part event, pianist and NEA Jazz Master Marilyn Crispell joins curatorial assistant in Modern and Contemporary Art Sam Lincoln in the gallery featuring the work of American artist Cy Twombly to discuss the artist’s work and its connections to music. 

Following this gallery conversation, Crispell and fellow musicians offer a performance in Griffin Court in dialogue with Twombly’s work.

About the Performers

The quartet of 2026 Jazz Foundation of America Jazz Legacy Fellow and master pianist Marilyn Crispell, bass clarinetist Jason Stein, double bassist Damon Smith, and drummer Adam Shead is an intergenerational ensemble devoted to long-form collective improvisation, extended formal development, and deeply relational listening. Emerging from the long-standing trio of Stein, Smith, and Shead, the group formed in 2023 at Smith’s invitation to Crispell, establishing a collaborative framework grounded in continuity and sustained ensemble inquiry, rather than project-based production. Their work is documented on spi-raling horn (Irritable Mystic Records, 2024) and Live at the Hungry Brain (Trost Records, 2025), recordings that highlight dynamic density shifts, emergent structure, and a fluid negotiation of intensity and restraint. Crispell’s pianistic language—shaped through her historic association with Anthony Braxton and her foundational role in post-1960s creative music—interacts with the trio’s established improvisational ecology to create a distributed, non-hierarchical ensemble sound. 

A central conceptual dimension of the quartet’s aesthetic is its sustained dialogue with the visual art of Cy Twombly, whose gestural abstraction informs the group’s thinking about physicality, inscription, and non-linear form. Twombly’s paintings appear on the covers of both releases, functioning as parallel models of embodied mark-making and accumulation rather than programmatic sources. Through extended-duration performance, the quartet develops large-scale formal coherence from micro-level interaction, treating time, density, and texture as primary structural materials. Situated within lineages of free improvisation and experimental jazz, the ensemble articulates a distinct identity rooted in collective authorship, processual form, and interdisciplinary exchange. 

Sam Lincoln (he/him) is a curatorial assistant in the department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, with a research focus on the moving image and classical reception in contemporary art. Prior to joining the Art Institute, he worked as a researcher at the Isaac Julien Studio and co-founded Bolding Gallery, a not-for-profit art and performance space in London, England. He holds a master of studies in the history of art and visual culture from the University of Oxford.

What to Expect

This program will take place in the museum’s Modern Wing, which can be entered from Monroe Street. This is the first part of a two-part program and takes place from 5:30 to 6:00 in Gallery 297, which is accessible by stairs and elevator. Space is limited, and stools will not be provided for the gallery portion of the program. 

The second part of the program, a music performance, will be 6:30–7:30 in Griffin Court. Some stools will be provided for this portion, and ample space will be available to attend. 

ASL interpretation and/or assisted listening devices are available for the gallery talk portion upon request at [email protected]. Assisted listening devices are limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Requests must be made at least two weeks in advance.

Sponsors

This event is made possible through the generous support of WDCB 90.9 FM and Rembrandt Chamber Musicians and in partnership with Chicago Humanities.