Ellen Priest’s work is currently on view in the new Yale Divinity School atrium.
The 7 works are on loan through December 2024.
photography courtesy of Chris Gardner
ELLEN PRIEST: On Being American/Jazz: Ryan Cohan’s The River
The music of Chicago pianist/composer Ryan Cohan is the subject of Ellen Priest’s 2016-2020 series of abstract paintings and drawings, “On Being American/Jazz: Ryan Cohan’s The River”.
Guggenheim Fellow Ryan Cohan and his quartet were selected by the U.S. State Department and Jazz at Lincoln Center to tour several African nations in 2008 as cultural ambassadors, working with musicians there. Cohan spent a year digesting his experience and writing The River – commissioned by Chamber Music America and recorded in 2013 with support from the Aaron Copland Fund.
In Cohan’s suite, the River is represented by recurring improvised melodic and rhythmic themes that wind through the longer, composed movements, appearing and disappearing as a river does in a landscape.
For her multi-year project, Priest chose The River for its beauty, intellect, emotional range and panoramic scale. She writes, “In it I hear voices of Latin and Afro-Cuban Jazz, African drumming with its layered rhythms, Aaron Copland’s uplifting compositions, call-and-response forms from Africa and the African-American South, and the gritty Chicago Blues and Jazz tradition Cohan grew up in. The River offers me rich musical spaces and emotional content to work with.
“For me, The River Project is a ‘coming home’ – an embrace embodied in my work. Coming of age in the Vietnam era, I have long struggled with the contradictions in America, especially my country’s persistent difficulty embracing the diversity that defines it and makes it thrive. Yet, both the Abstract Expressionism that has provided a critical artistic source and the Jazz (our great American art form) that has been my beloved subject for twenty-five years could only have happened here.”
View the full series on Ellen Priest’s website: “On Being American/Jazz: Ryan Cohan’s The River”
Read more about artist Ellen Priest HERE.
