Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere: As far as the ear can hear

As far as the ear can hear presents a selection of works by Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere that activate sound across landscapes of the Bronx, New Orleans, and the Sonoran Desert. Working in video, installation, photography, music, and performance, the artists explore the social dimensions of sound and the act of listening, linking distinct geographies and histories through resonance, gestures, and call-and response. Frequently collaborating with musicians, performers, and archival materials, Nevarez and Tevere use sound to trace the movement of memory across landscapes shaped by migration, environmental precarity, cultural transmission, and political struggle.

As far as the ear can hear includes the artists’ most recent multimedia installation, On Toscanini (2026), conceived during their 2025 Winter Workspace artist residency at Wave Hill. While in residence, Nevarez and Tevere researched acclaimed Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini (b. 1867, Parma, Italy; d. 1957, Riverdale, Bronx, NY), who lived at Wave Hill during World War II between 1942 and 1945. Appointed the first music director of the NBC Symphony Orchestra from 1937 to 1954, Toscanini became a household name through his radio and television broadcasts of classical music. On Toscanini centers his performances through non-verbal forms of communication—hand motions, body language, and baton gestures—translated into a visual and aural installation featuring images of Toscanini’s conducting hands and an operatic soundscape designed by the artists and transmitted through an orchestra of FM radios.

Earlier works trace the artists’ inquiry into voice, echo, and spatial resonance. In Parley (2015), for example, Nevarez and Tevere use the musical framework of call and response to construct a bilingual dialogue assembled and sampled from cut-up hip-hop lyrics written between 1980 and 1988. Originally commissioned for the 2015 exhibition When You Cut Into the Present the Future Leaks Out at the Old Bronx Borough Courthouse, the work, performed by Bronx-based pioneering b-girl Rokafella (Ana Garcia) and MC Lady L (Lynn Saunders), reanimates questions of truth, justice, and hope through the lyrical histories of early hip-hop culture.

In Sonora (2017), the artists work with countertenor Juecheng Chen to reinterpret Harry Torrani’s Mocking Bird Yodel, expanding a 1937 American folk song into an audiovisual meditation on long-distance communication across the contested border terrain of the Sonoran Desert. These investigations continue in The Slow Drop (2020–2023), a multidisciplinary project developed in collaboration with residents of New Orleans’ Musicians’ Village as a creative response to the new realities of changing landscapes in the wake of climate change. In October 2022, the musicians performed a neighborhood score in unison across the Village from their porches and yards, weaving together melodic textures, percussive accents, and vibrant tones that referenced the ecology and layered acoustic environment of New Orleans. The Slow Drop performance began and culminated in a dynamic interpretation of a Yorùbá folk song honoring the sacred Iroko tree, a living bridge between ancestral memory and the spiritual realm. Nevarez and Tevere’s installation at Wave Hill reconfigures the performance as a multi-channel, moving image and spatial sound work that reflects on music as a generator of new forms of collective imagination and resilience amid environmental crisis and social repair.

As far as the ear can hear extends attention from the visual to the sonic, toward listening as an equally embodied mode of encountering the world. Just as “the eye” suggests that seeing is conditioned by position and perspective, “the ear” emphasizes how listening connects people and places through vibration, echo, and transmission across space and time. From New York hip-hop communities to the Sonoran Desert and post-Katrina New Orleans, as well as the afterlives of Toscanini’s broadcast media, the artists frame listening and sonic modalities as transformative practices that link fragmented histories and open new forms of relation.