Simmer & Nourish: A Cook-out Conversation with Zeelie Brown

Join Recess for an indoor "cook-out" and conversation with artist Zeelie Brown exploring the relationships between music, land, and inherited traditions of sound.

Guests are invited to share a homestyle meal—featuring Black Southern dishes like collards and butter beans—before gathering for a conversation and demonstration with Brown and special guests.

The evening will include reflections on musical lineage, the cello’s place within classical and experimental traditions, and the ways artists reinterpret inherited forms. Through conversation, listening, and live musical examples, the program offers insight into the creative processes shaping Brown’s evolving installation and the sonata that will premiere at the close of the exhibition.

Food will be served throughout the evening, with time for informal conversation before and after the program.

About the Project

For their Session at Recess, Brown presents an evolving installation and performance laboratory exploring sound, ecology, and systems of value across the Gulf and Global South. Throughout the exhibition, the gallery functions as a site of research, rehearsal, and collective gathering as the artist develops a new sonata alongside sound works, altars, and hand-painted fabric hangings.

46 Washington Ave. Brooklyn, NY 11205

Either the artist or Recess staff will be available to view the project in process. Most days, Zeelie will be present for open rehearsals, which you are welcome to respectfully witness. During open hours, visitors are invited to play records from the artist’s personal collection.

About Session

Recess’s Session program offers artists flexible time and space to develop ambitious projects in a public setting. Visitors encounter works-in-progress, installations, and collaborative experiments as they evolve in real time.

Session supports the creation of new work by giving artists a project stipend, artist’s fee, technical support, mentorship, and approximately two months to transform Recess into a hybrid of a productive studio space dynamic exhibition platform. Throughout the session, we will facilitate public interactions with the Recess community, as well as connections among intentional communities as identified by each artist. Our hope is that these engagements provide an opportunity for mutually beneficial exchanges that not only refine the artists’ thinking, but that challenge dominant narratives and activate new forms of artmaking.

About Recess

Recess partners with artists, youth, writers, and their chosen publics to create transformative cultural experiences.

Our programs welcome radical thinkers to imagine and shape networks of resilience and safety. By challenging dominant narratives and activating new forms of creative production, Recess defines and advances the possibilities of contemporary art.

Recess is free and open to the public to serve as a meeting place to generate art, ideas and actions.

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