Guillermo Galindo
Post-Mexican composer/artist
The extent of the work of experimental composer, sonic architect, performance artist and visual media artist Guillermo Galindo, redefines the conventional limits between music, the art of music composition and the intersections between art disciplines, politics, humanitarian issues, spirituality and social awareness.
His acoustic work includes two commissioned orchestral compositions by the OFUNAM (Mexico University Orchestra) and the Oakland Symphony Orchestra and Choir, solo instrumental works, two operas, sonic sculptures, visual arts, computer interaction works, electro-acoustic music, film, instrument building, three-dimensional immersive installations and live improvisation.
Galindo’s graphic scores and three-dimensional sculptural cyber-totemic sonic objects have been shown at major museums and art biennials in America, Europe and Asia including (amongst others) documenta14 (2017), Pacific Standard Time (2017) and it is now part of the permanent collections of The Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas, The Cornell Fine Arts Museum in Florida, LACMA in Los Angeles, California and The National Gallery in Washington DC.
His work has been featured on: BBC Outlook (London), NHK World (Japan),Vice Magazine (London), HFFDK (Germany), RTS (Switzerland), NPR (U.S.), CBC (Canada), Art in America (U.S), Reforma Newspaper (Mexico), CNN, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times (U.S.).
Galindo has performed at the CTM Festival (Berlin), San Francisco Jazz Festival, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (U.S.), Schrin Kunsthalle (Frankfurt) among many other venues.
Galindo’s collaborations includes artists, performers and writers such as Anne Carson, Guillermo Gomez Peña, Michael McClure, the Paul Dresher Ensemble and the Kronos Quartet.
In 2011 Galindo embarked on a unique collaboration with lauded American photographer Richard Misrach which became a traveling exhibit and an award-winning book published by Aperture Foundation. Border Cantos features Misrach’s photographs of the U.S./ Mexico border and Galindo’s sonic devices and graphic musical scores created from detritus left behind by immigrants and the border patrol apparatus.
Selected venues that have exhibited Border Cantos include: The Cantor Museum, Stanford, California (2021), The High Line, New York, (2021), Westmorland Museum, PA (2021), The Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston (2019), Cornell FIne Are Museum, Florida (2019), Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, Arkansas (2017), Pace Gallery, New York (2017) and the San Jose Museum of Art (2016).
After the Border Cantos series, Galindo continues his solo work as an artist, performer and composer. In 2017 Galindo was invited to participate in the documenta14 art biennale showing the Echo Exodus series. This body of work, which has been exhibited in both Athens, Greece and in Kassel, Germany, consists of sonic devices and graphic scores made from belongings left behind by African and Middle Eastern migrants and refugees.The version displayed at documenta14, entitled Fluchtzieleuropaschiffbruchschallkörper, included two immigrant boats found abandoned on the island of Lesbos in 2016.
Following migration routes, the wreckage of these boats traveled from Greece to Germany and became sonic devices for compositions that Galindo specifically wrote and performed at documenta 14.
Images of these boats became iconic during the European refugee crisis and were published around the world. This work, as well as Galindo’s commissioned piece by the Kronos Quartet Fifty for the Future project, allowed him to continue to explore his interest in the intersection of art and social consciousness. His interactive string quartet Remote Control, which comments on the dehumanization of violence and virtual reality premiered in 2018 in San Francisco, California.
In 2017 the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time biennale included Galindo’s solo exhibit Sonic Botany, an installation commenting on genetics and colonization and the environment in a post-apocalyptic world, was shown at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California.
Guillermo Galindo presently teaches at the California College of Arts in San Francisco and has also been invited as a Mohr Visiting Artist at Stanford University (2018) and as a resident artist at Vanderbilt University and a Thomas P. Johnson Distinguished Visiting Scholar 2019 at the Rollins Cornell Arts Museum. He has also been a recipient of the Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Grant.
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+Last corrected:edited bio 06:2021
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