An Evening with Satch Hoyt

Satch Hoyt is a spiritualist, a believer in ritual and retention. A visual artist and a musician, his diverse and multifaceted body of work - whether sculpture, sound installation, painting, musical performance, or musical recording - is united in its investigation of the “Eternal Afro-Sonic Signifier” and its movement across and amid the cultures, peoples, places, and times of the African Diaspora. Those four evocative words (a term coined by Hoyt) refer to the “mnemonic network of sound” that was enslaved Africans’ “sole companion during the forced migration of the Middle Passage.”1 lt was, and is, a hard-won somatic tool kit for remembering where you come from and who you are - and maybe, where you’re going - against all the many odds.

Of Jamaican-British descent, Hoyt was born in London and currently lives in Berlin. Having also spent time in New York, Paris, Mombasa, and Australia’s Northern Territory - all points on the many-sided and ever- expanding star that is the African Diaspora - he is an inti mate observer of the sites of convergence where the Diaspora comes together to sing, shout, and be, reflecting itself to itself. Employing the shared tool kit to connect, express, and commiserate across centuries and oceans, Hoyt taps into aural and oral echoes as well as into those retained in the historical and material record.

Selected exhibitions & projects include:

Un-Muting Sonic Restitutions, MARKK Museum Hamburg (2024); Afro-Sonic Mapping, House of World Cultures, Berlin (2019); Get Up, Stand Up Now - Generations of Black Ceative Pioneers, Somerset House, London (2019); Respect Hip Hop Style and Wisdom, Oakland Museum of California (2018); Dakart, the Dakar Biennale Senegal (2018); The World’s Game: Fútbol and Contemporary Art, Perez Art Museum, Miami (2018); The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, Prospect 4, (the USA Triennial) (2017); The Beautiful Game, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2014); Rehearsal at Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah GA (2013); Radical Presence, Black Performance in Contemporary Art, Grey Art Gallery, New York University (2013); Newtopia: The State of Human Rights, Museum for the Holocaust and Human Rights, Mechelen Belgium (2012); Radical Presence, CAMH Texas (2012); The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (2011); Art is a Combat Sport, Museum of Fine Art, Calais, France (2011); The Global Africa Project, Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2010).

Hoyt has participated in Infinite Island, Contemporary Caribbean Art, Brooklyn Museum (2007): San Juan Triennial, Puerto Rico (2009); the Beijing Biennial, China (2008); Equatorial Rhythms, The Stenersen Museum, Norway (2007); Black Light White Noise, Sound and Light in Contemporary Art, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2007); the Tate Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, U.K. (2004); Open House: Working in Brooklyn, Brooklyn Museum of Art (2004); Brown v. Board of Education, Gallery 138, New York (2004); Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2003) traveling to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2004) and the Barbican Art Gallery, London, U.K. (2004); The Squared Circle: Boxing in Contemporary Art, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2003); Body Power/Power Play, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Germany (2002) and SportCult, apexart, New York (2001).

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