The experience of the new Still In Sound exhibit at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver begins long before you step up the concrete stairs and lay eyes on one of Still’s masterpieces. It starts with your ears, as auditory interpretations of visual works echo off the walls around the building.
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Take Still’s PH-1161 painting from 1960. It may just look like blue and black jagged lines on a cream background. But to Denver artist Kalyn Heffernan, it sounds like rhythmic beats, hisses and static, and bites of Clyfford Still himself, opining about the art museum business and complaining about art critics.
“It was cool to hear his not so humble opinions in his voice, and it's something I can resonate with, in maybe a different medium, like a diss track,” Heffernan said in a recorded interview with the museum. “He's on tape with a lot of diss tracks.”
Heffernan was one of five artists asked to come up with an auditory response to Still’s works. They even got access to the museum’s voice recordings and audio archives. Ben Coleman, co-curator of the exhibit alongside Bailey Placzek, said Heffernan’s interpretation took cues from the visible aging of the painting.
“She's using a lot of interesting surface noise from the tapes that Clyfford Still had used,” Coleman said. “You hear a lot of kind of like hiss and rumble from the actual material of the media.”
Each work plays one by one on a cycle, with speakers directly above the work. There were no limits on length or the type of sounds that could be used, so artists went in a variety of directions. Some leaned into Still’s characteristics – adding early New Orleans jazz from his record collection or mixing in the roar of a Jaguar sports car, which Still collected.
“We just wanted to really emphasize that we wanted an authentic response, an interpretation that was uniquely theirs,” Coleman said. “A big part of the drive, I think, in interpreting Still's work, and something that he insisted on, is that everyone's interpretation is correct. There's no one correct interpretation.”
Coleman expressed this point while looking at one of his favorite paintings in the exhibit, PH-273. This one doesn't have an artistic interpretation — it was added by Placzek to complement the exhibit. There is a giant pink shape taking up half of the canvas.
“I dubbed that the bubblegum bison,” Coleman said. “Sometimes works for me are just lines, especially some of the minimal work that I really, really love, and it's more about, like, ‘Well, do you like those lines?' It doesn't have to be anything more than that, necessarily.”
It's the first time a sound-forward exhibit has been done at this scale at the museum before – and that’s intentional. Coleman said he wants to go against the norms of how traditional museums conduct themselves.
“We still have a big hangover from the history of institutions like museums of ‘shushing,’” Coleman said. “I think a big part of this show is kind of trying to flip that on its head and give people permission to make noise.”
There are a few areas where visitors can express themselves. In one room is what Coleman affectionately calls the “Boom Boom” – a piano loaded with sound effects recorded around the museum by small children. Next to the piano are paper and markers to create a visual response that would be displayed by the museum.
In another room, there’s an array of instruments: a Kalimba Mbira Array (a finger-plucking piano), a bodhrán (an Irish drum), and a handpan steel drum. When played, it activates color and brushstrokes on a screen. It was primarily designed by Denver artist Phil Stearns after viewing Still’s oil pastel works on paper.
“For me, there was a lot of like motion and things evoking kind of like weather patterns, turbulence, so those kind of went into the way that I generated the visuals that are being projected,” Stearns said.
Stearns watched as both the young and the old approached the instruments. He tried to pick instruments that weren’t intimidating and invited curiosity. He hopes that visitors use more than just one sense when interacting with this exhibit.
“When you bring in other senses and make them concrete experiences in relation to what would otherwise be a purely visual experience, you really kind of open things up in a new way,” Stearns said.
Still In Sound runs through Feb. 14, 2027. Tickets can be purchased on the museum’s website, or you can experience the exhibit on your own time through their digital guide on Bloomberg Connects.
