At this one-night-only live premiere, composer D. Riley Nicholson is set to debut Refugium: an innovative performance blending classical music with experimental instrumentation. Accompanying Nicholson on the piano are musicians from the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra playing viola, cello, and upright bass to amplify the experience.
Nicholson’s score is an adapted interpretation of the weather data that informed Nathalie Miebach’s installation Under A Restless Sky, currently on view in the AMFA Galleries.
Marking the latest edition of Miebach’s Weather Score Project – through which the artist translates collected weather data into musical scores – this performance explores the impact of environmental changes and expresses the emotions felt by those who experience them.
After the performance, enjoy a conversation between Miebach and Nicholson as they discuss how they collaborated to transform data into their individual art forms.
The evening concludes with a reception in the Cultural Living Room.
Under A Restless Sky: Art and Music (Refugium) is presented by the Vratsinas Foundation.
Nathalie Miebach: Under A Restless Sky is supported in part by The Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston and Bank of America.
This exhibition is organized by the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts.
Image courtesy of Jason Masters.
Photograph by r.r. jones, courtesy of D. Riley Nicholson.
A composer and pianist with roots in Arkansas, D. Riley Nicholson has composed and performed for a wide range of ensembles and media.
Notable projects include One, for large string orchestra, which headlined the Hot Air Music Festival in 2016. Nicholson composed, produced, and performed Shimmer, for piano, visuals, and electronics, which toured nationally in 2018. Later that year, he was honored as the California Association of Professional Music Teachers (CAPMT) Distinguished Composer of the Year. In 2019, his performance of Julius Eastman’s music was described as a “powerful, ingeniously wrought rendition” by the San Francisco Chronicle. That same year, Nicholson wrote a new work for the Amaranth String Quartet.
In 2021, Nicholson created original music for the Walking Distance Dance Festival (ODC Dance). In 2022, he wrote a full-length electroacoustic piece for David Herrera Performance Company. Recently, Nicholson collaborated with pianists Sarah Cahill and Regina Myers on a recording of his work Up and wrote a new work for the electric guitar trio Harjo.
Riley holds a master’s in composition from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, a bachelor’s in percussion performance, and a bachelor’s in psychology from the University of Memphis.
Nicholson serves as the Executive Director of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, the longest-running and preeminent festival dedicated to new music for orchestra, based in Santa Cruz, CA.
Boston-based artist Nathalie Miebach creates innovative installations that intersect art and science. She deeply researches and tracks data connected to weather patterns and natural disasters to explore their impact on people’s lives.
Like a scientist, Miebach gathers research and creates data sets, translating the information into colorful, playful, and even hopeful installations made from painted paper, wood, and other various materials. Miebach distills the scientific complexity behind her work to reveal human stories of resilience and ingenuity in the face of our changing environment.
Miebach holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Eastern Asian Studies from Oberlin College, Ohio, along with two master’s degrees in fine arts, sculpture, and art education, both from the Massachusetts College of Arts. She also completed courses in astronomy, physics, and oceanography at the Harvard University Extension School, Massachusetts. Miebach’s solo exhibitions include presentations at the Institute of Contemporary Art – San Diego, California, the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Houston, Texas, and Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, Massachusetts, among others.
She has also participated in group presentations at numerous institutions including, Louisiana State University Museum of Art, Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts; Minneapolis Museum of Art, Minnesota; the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; and the Frist Museum of Art, Nashville, Tennessee, among others.
Boston-based artist Nathalie Miebach creates innovative installations that intersect art and science. She deeply researches and tracks data connected to weather patterns and natural disasters to explore their impact on people’s lives.
