Anna Roberts-Gevalt's SICK CENTER
Sick Center, created by Anna Roberts-Gevalt, is an experimental audio series exploring the creation and history of Sick Music through interviews, research, and collective experiments around the making of art with illness.
Sick Center is an exploration of the making of art by Sick people. It began as a speculation made in Anna RG’s own illness isolation: What if there was a place where others in my same situation could build solidarity, creative community, and an archive of our work?
Since her diagnosis, Anna RG has explored these themes in many ways but the work takes a new form in Sick Center. She is creating a series of audio documentaries, to be released as podcasts, about Sick Music History. This format was chosen specifically to reach her primary sick audience, for whom concerts and gallery spaces remain inaccessible in light of the continued spread of COVID-19. The documentaries will explore questions of formal language, access, and ancestors in sick music-making, and create an opportunity to speculate on how life as a sick artist could be given the right support and accessibility.
The story will begin with “Bed Pianos,” an innovative creation for “invalids” and injured soldiers in the 1930s and 1940s. Little evidence remains of these instruments and production ceased a few years following their invention. The story is a story of what is missing: these instruments, the artists who played them, the art created on them, and the possibility they hold in the realm of sick artistic expression.
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ABOUT THE ARTIST: ANNA ROBERTS GEVALT is an artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores the forms and lineages of Sick Music and Sick Listening, topics they examine in their works of audio-fiction, sculpture, composition, drawing, and social practice.
Anna’s recent MFA thesis at Bard’s Milton Avery School for the Arts, depicted a fictional neighborhood organization that housed resources for sick musicians, housed a library of their histories, and offered door-to-door singing services. Her practice speculates in disabled utopia on one hand, and in community organizing and historical research in another, embracing the ways the two threads deepen, challenge, and inform each other. Informed by her lived experiences with disability and chronic illness (Long Covid), Anna’s organizing practice includes being a founding member of Artists in Resistance, a disabled-led group that runs an air purifier lending library, and peer education around Covid safety, and a member of RAMPD - Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities.
A lauded musician, her album, “The Invisible Comes to Us,” with Smithsonian Folkways with longtime collaborator Elizabeth LaPrelle was called “a radical expansion of what folk songs are supposed to do” by The New Yorker. Coming out of a decade of immersion in orally transmitted Appalachian music traditions (Anna, a blue-ribbon fiddler at fiddle conventions), they created experimental performances with the ancient repertoire and stories of ballad singers. Anna has performed at Carnegie Hall, Newport Folk Festival, NPR Tiny Desk, BBCRadio2, and the Hirshhorn Museum, and with Lonnie Holley, Glen Hansard, and Paul Wiancko (Kronos). She has been a resident artist at MacDowell, the Smithsonian Year of Music, and was guest curator of traditional music at Big Ears Music Festival.