Sonorous Somatics 010: Ernest Dawkins' New Horizons Quartet

Sonorous Somatics is the sound and listening series curated by BSA Gold in response to Blanc Gallery's Exhibition program. With each exhibition, Gold critically engages with the themes of the work, inviting musicians and sound artists to create an environment that extends and deepens the conversations on the walls. Each of these evenings have created exciting new pathways for engagemnt, demonstrating the necessary and important dialogue that opens up between different mediums. Importantly for Blanc, Sonorous Somatics demonstrates our commitment to fostering a community of interdisciplary artists and art lovers who always know that Blanc will provide a space for exploration and experimentation.

About Sonorous Somatic 010: Ernest Dawkins' New Horizons Quartet

If anyone can speak to the ever-changing landscape of Chicago, it's Ernest Dawkins. A mentor, guide, and proverbial "big brother" to up and coming creatives in Chicago, Dawkins' decades-long memory of the city, its people, and its politics translates into powerful intergenerational storytelling. This is best exemplified by the ways Dawkins makes a conscious effort to include younger artists in his ensemble to expand its reach and narrative. This performance is a meditation on Norman Teague, Max Sansing, and Steve Bravo's exhibition I Used to Live in Chicago which speaks to themes around space and identity in Black neighborhoods.

About Ernest Dawkins:

Ernest Dawkins is one of the world’s leading saxophonists and composers, known for music that embodies the evolving cultural memory of the African American experience. His recent major works include Great Black Music (2025) dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the AACM. Paul Robeson: Man of the People (2024), Tim Black, Blacker Than Black (2022), Refound Connections (2021), and Redefining Frederick Douglass (2020). Dawkins has collaborated internationally, including the MacArthur-funded 2019 Englewood to Soweto project in South Africa, and is the creator of Quantum Englewood, recipient of the 2016 Joyce Award. He serves as Executive Director of Live the Spirit Residency, is a former Chairman of the AACM, performs globally, and hosts a longstanding weekly jam session at Norman’s Bistro in Chicago.

About the Exhibition:

I Used to Live in Chicago is a multidisciplinary exhibition exploring memory, displacement, and cultural resilience across Chicago's historically Black neighborhoods. 

Curated by Anefertiti Bowman, the exhibition brings together leading contemporary artists Norman Teague, Max Sansing, and Steve Bravo, alongside elder Chicago artists Sura Dupart, Tyrue “Slang” Jones, and Patric McCoy. Together, their work forms a layered, intergenerational dialogue rooted in lived experience, cultural memory, and the evolving realities of the city.

Through furniture and object-based design, mural-scale painting, sculptural forms, and graphic storytelling, the exhibition examines what it means to belong to a city in constant transformation and who retains access to space, identity, and legacy amid redevelopment and erasure.

At its core, I Used to Live in Chicago is both a love letter and a retrospective. It holds the emotional weight of change while honoring the communities that have long defined the city’s cultural fabric. We invite viewers into a space of reminiscence and nostalgia, of pickles and peppermint, of front porch conversations that felt like ceremony, of a time when ease lived more readily in our bodies and belonging felt less fragile. It gestures toward a Chicago many remember not as perfect, but as deeply alive, rooted in connection, creativity, and possibility. A city where basslines from passing cars became a shared soundtrack, and community existed not just in proximity, but in practice, embodied and lived in real time.

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Event Details:

Doors: 1.30pm

Performance Starts: 2pm

Please arrive early so you have time to wander around the exhibition and engage with the work. This will allow you an extra layer of depth in engaging with the music on the afternoon.

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Host or Publisher Blanc Gallery