the sun has its own drum: Four Artists Listening Across Worlds

Above images: the sun has its own drum, 2025. Exhibition view. Photo credit: Rythum Vinoben.

For painter and storyteller Robert Peters (Mashpee Wampanoag), sound is a portal—an opening between worlds. His works in the exhibition explore how music and voice activate movement, knowledge, and transformation.

One piece, Teleportation, features a drummer whose rhythm becomes a vessel of travel. As Peters describes it, “he’s transporting from one place to another through his music. His music enables him to travel… simply by playing the music.” Another work, Illumination, centers the human voice as ancestral truth-telling: “There’s music coming from his mouth, and he’s telling his story… thus illuminating everyone to what it is to who he is and what he represents.”

Sound, for Peters, is inseparable from the living materials he paints upon. When Young asks about his method of staining woodgrain into sonic forms, Peters answers simply: “It’s actually the wood talking… telling its story.” The vibrations of music and the material memory of wood echo one another—both carriers of histories that exceed language.

Above images: the sun has its own drum, 2025. Exhibition view. Photo credit: Rythum Vinoben.

Artist and marine scientist Elizabeth James-Perry (Aquinnah Wampanoag) approaches sound as a living, ecological communication system—one that connects marine mammals, ancestral homelands, and cultural continuity.

The piece Echolocation, James-Perry’s wampum cuff of shell beads on handspun milkweed cordage, translates a scientific sonograph of a sperm whale’s echolocation into beadwork, thus bridging Indigenous science and contemporary marine research. “Sperm whales send out sound,” she explains, “and then… receive the sound, and it gives them a sense of orientation.”

James-Perry describes being on research boats observing whales—humpbacks bubble-feeding, minkes cutting through the water—and feeling their “natural rhythm,” which she recreates in bead and shell.

Her series All My Friends Are Sea Goddesses imagines Squant, a sea goddess, as a listener gathering the ocean’s stories: from the minuscule plankton symbolized in green beads, to wampum barnacles and jellyfish, to robust sunfish, sharks and whales. “If she has multiple eyes, maybe she has multiple ears,” James-Perry muses. Each earring becomes a listening device for marine life—sharks, plankton, turtles—rendered in wampum, dyed milkweed cordage, and historically resonant glass beads. “Thinking of Squant as listening to and collecting the stories of the sea was very much what I was… weaving into the work.”

Young sees James-Perry’s work as a conceptual keystone of the exhibition: “By connecting environmental regeneration with the longstanding cultural practice of wampum beadwork, James-Perry affirms the inseparable connection between environmental health and the survival of Wampanoag cultural heritage.”

Above images: the sun has its own drum, 2025. Exhibition view. Photo credit: Rythum Vinoben.

Painter Duane Slick (Meskwaki Nation of Iowa, Ho-Chunk Nation of Nebraska) brings sound into the exhibition through the perceptual shifts of nighttime and the residues of grief. His Night Paintings series emerged from a period marked by loss: the deaths of his father, sister, and brother. The palette darkened—white-on-white abstractions became atmospheric black expanses punctuated with geometric shapes.

Slick describes night as “a state of deprivation… visual deprivation,” where naming becomes difficult. In that altered sensory field, sound sharpens: “There’s more of a need to embrace a sonic perception of the space.”

His abstractions carry ceremonial resonance. Traditional songs and night chants echo through layered shadows and shifting spatial cues. For Slick, abstraction is a form of protection and cultural protocol: “They may have said you cannot speak… but they never said you cannot paint or draw.”

He paints the unsayable, the indirect, the held-close. The sonic, here, is not a literal frequency but a felt vibration; a resonance shaped by memory, protocol, and lived experience.

Above images: the sun has its own drum, 2025. Exhibition view. Photo credit: Rythum Vinoben.

For Erin Genia (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, Dakota), sound is not only vibration or metaphor—it is a carrier of memory, ceremony, and Indigenous futurity. Her ongoing series Sound Vessels forms the heart of her contribution to the exhibition. These sculptural forms—ceramic vessels embedded with transducers and audio circuitry—convert the surface of clay into a resonant body capable of emitting sound.

Genia emphasizes the conceptual foundation of her contribution: “Every time I do Sound Vessels, something else emerges,” she explains, noting that her Sound Vessels are not static works. “The interaction between the clay vessels and the sound, the surface transducers… you never know exactly what sound is going to be coming out of it.” In this new iteration, she recorded the crackling sound of fire—a sonic element layered with cultural meaning. Each vessel emits its own fire-timeline, producing shifting overlaps and unpredictable sonic collages.

Genia’s relationship to sound is also linguistic. “Dakota Language is an endangered language,” she notes. “I always try to highlight the language in my work.” Earlier versions of the project incorporated spoken Dakota recordings; although the current iteration focuses on fire, the linguistic framework remains an inseparable part of the work’s identity.

Initially conceived as a more concealed installation, Sound Vessels has become increasingly transparent in its materiality. “For this piece, I really wanted to highlight the wires and the audio equipment,” Genia explains. The result foregrounds technology as an aesthetic and conceptual collaborator.

Her work bridges sonic physics, Indigenous language, ceremonial fire, and technological experimentation. The vessels pulse with life, asking audiences to listen with their bodies as much as their ears.

Above images: the sun has its own drum, 2025. Exhibition view. Photo credit: Rythum Vinoben.

What makes the sun has its own drum so distinct is that its theme emerged through listening: to artists, to land, to water, to materials, and to the frequencies that hold Indigenous knowledge systems.

Young reflects on Western culture’s bias toward vision and text— “the dominance of the written word”— and how this has marginalized embodied forms of knowing, including sonic knowledge. In contrast, the artists in this exhibition use sound—literal, metaphorical, ecological, ancestral—to rebuild those knowledges.

Through their work, sound becomes:

• a portal (Peters)
• a marine communication system (James-Perry)
• a perceptual state shaped by grief and ceremony (Slick)
• a resonant bridge across worlds (Genia)

Together, they remind us that listening is a political, cultural, and spiritual practice.

the sun has its own drum is on view through December 14, 2025.