Happy Holidays from EUSA!

Happy Holidays from all of us at ExhibitsUSA!

Having the joy of the holiday season on our minds, this month’s featured exhibition is Tuned to the Spirit: Photographs from the Sacred Steel Community. The exhibition offers an elegant, sensitive, and deeply respectful portrait of music-making and worship in African American faith communities that are set apart by their embrace of the electric steel guitar as a primary instrument of praise.

Folklorist Robert Stone’s first audio recordings of the “sacred steel” guitar musical tradition of African American Pentecostal churches were released in the 1990s. The musically unique and passionately played performances created an immediate international roots music sensation, which continues to endure. Resulting from nearly three decades of close interaction with the worship communities, Stone’s photographs present an intimate picture of praise, prayer, contemplation and celebration in the Spirit. Altogether, the images offer vivid, eloquent testament to the power of music in the expression of joy and communion. This exhibition is augmented by video and audio, and is organized by The Arhoolie Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the documentation, preservation, and celebration of regional roots music and its makers. It is an excellent small-scale exhibit for venues with security and environmental limitations, such as theatre lobbies, libraries, and multi-cultural centers.

Holiday Tunes

Inspired by our new Tuned to the Spirit exhibition, enjoy “The Dreydl Song” by the Campbell Brothers on the album Sacred Steel: