Skip to content
Recess homepage

Session

sonata for cello, electronics and voice to seed whatever flourishes after the end of the american empire 

Zeelie Brown

Due to the process-based nature of the Session program, this project will undergo constant modifications; the features of this page provide accruing information on the project’s developments.

Date:
March 22–May 13, 2026

The artist will compose and premiere a new sonata exploring the links between music, ecology, and spatial justice developed through a drop-in composition studio open to the public. This will be accompanied by three community dinners which will pair Black and Brown scholars, artists, and community activists who have roots in the Gulf and Global South to talk about music, food sovereignty, Black ecologies, and building climate resilient communities. 

About the artist

Zeelie Brown

Artist

Zeelie Brown is a cellist, composer, multimedia artist, farmer, and chef. Their first art museum was the loblolly pine woods in coastal Alabama and the limestone walls of San Antonio. Their work investigates the vernacular cultures and ecologies of the Black Gulf and Global South as a means of overcoming the plantation to petroleum legacies of genocidal white greed that threaten to drown our world. They studied Black performance, jazz cello and Black vernacular art at Oberlin College. They have been a Create Change Fellow with the Laundromat Project, a Forge Fellow, a Climate Rising fellow at A Studio in the Woods, a FARMS apprentice at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, an apprentice butcher at Fleishers, and Transjustice Community Fellow at the Audre Lorde Project. They've lectured at MIT, Tulane, Harvard, York University, Beam Camp, and the University of Southern Illinois. They have performed at CACNO, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, El Museo Del Barrio, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, and The Caribbean Cultural Center and Afro-Diasporic Institute. They've mounted exhibitions at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Harvestworks, Elsewhere Museum, and Flux Factory and have been supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Jerome Foundation, and Franklin Furnace.

Artist Website

Explore/Archive

See all

Opens May 14, 2026

DAWN-DUSK-DAWN

Bel Falleiros

A project that calls us, in this moment of social and environmental collapse, to make space to be with nature.

Opens January 14, 2026

Abolition Film Society

Kriss Li

A circle of creative exchanges between Assembly youths and 3 incarcerated participants from Parole Prep’s Archive-Based Creative Arts program

Opens November 13, 2025

Sick (Music) Center

Anna RG

An experimental research, development, and community space exploring and supporting Sick Listening and Music