LEAD & COAL: A SOUNDING
Friday, November 7, 2025
Door 6:30 pm | Performance 7:00 – 8:30 pm | Tulsa Artist Fellowship Project Space
Please join us for Lead & Coal: A Sounding, a sound performance by NNN Cook, Nokosee Fields, and Josh Levi, with video by Tulsa Artist Fellow Gavin Kroeber and Aaron Owens.
This performance is one part of a wider, eponymous sound art and critical spatial practice project exploring Ozark mining landscapes, initiated in St. Louis’ constitutive hinterlands: the Old Missouri Lead Belt and Southern Illinois Coal Belt. 19th-century St. Louis can arguably be understood as an extractivist war machine: digging up Illinois coal, melting Missouri lead, producing armaments for the St. Louis Arsenal, and provisioning the genocidal military forces at Jefferson Barracks. Over the past year, artists NNN Cook, Nokosee Fields, Gavin Kroeber, Josh Levi, and Aaron Owens have been visiting these post-industrial territories and performing “soundings”—sonic experiments conducted on, in, at, with, and for the land. During this performance, Cook, Fields, and Levi will mark the culmination of the wider project with a new improvised sound composition, drawing on their work together in the field. A video by Kroeber and Owens will accompany the performance, and copies of a new limited-edition vinyl record by the artists, released by Cook’s Close/Far Recordings, will be available for sale.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Interdisciplinary artist and designer Nathan Cook runs the experimental cassette label Close/Far Recordings, is the creator and curator of the St. Louis-based music, video, and art series Bruxism (2014-20), and co-creator, with Kevin Harris, of the intermedia art series Fulcrum (2023-ongoing). Performing solo and collaboratively as NNN Cook, he has shared programs with national and international artists such as John Luther Adams, Alarm Will Sound, Rene Hell, Coppice, Jozef Van Wissem, King Britt, Moor Mother, Jason Kahn, Damon Smith, JG Thirlwell, and Keith Fullerton Whitman. His work is typically concerned with proximity, geometry, mysticism, psychodynamics, identity, and the primeval. Cook’s work has been presented by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Laumeier Sculpture Park, World Chess Hall of Fame, Experimental Sound Studios, Radius, and High Concept Labs, among others. The Wire magazine said this of his solo release, “(Bl)end User”: “Cook is a distinctive voice in this crowded field.” www.close-far.com | www.nnncook.com
The great-nephew of celebrated Cherokee fiddler Sam O’Fields, Nokosee Fields carries a longstanding Cherokee fiddling tradition into the present. Through powerful live and recorded performances, he lovingly and playfully reimagines his tradition with immense skills and sensitivity as a performer of traditional fiddle music. He’s won some of the most prestigious contests in the United States and performed and taught at flagship festivals and workshops. In 2022, he collaborated with his mother, Anita Fields, on “Wayback,” a site-specific visual and sound art installation that addressed the complex history of their Osage ancestry. Commissioned for the public art triennial Counterpublic, it was located adjacent to Sugarloaf Mound, the last standing Mississippian mound in St. Louis, and was featured in the New York Times and NPR. www.nokoseefieldsmusic.com
Gavin Kroeber is an artist who creates events, gatherings, and excursions that interrogate the cultural dynamics of power and their expression in the poetics of place. His projects are collaborative, bringing interdisciplinary ensembles together within a constellation of sites to generate artworks and exhibitions. Kroeber is a “disciplinary belligerent,” poaching from visual art, urbanism, and experimental theater and intentionally blurring artistic, curatorial, and dramaturgical modes of authorship. He is a 2025-2027 Tulsa Artist Fellowship awardee, a 2024 Creative Capital awardee, and a 2022 Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellow. He holds a Master of Design Studies from the Harvard GSD and has taught at the College of Architecture at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art and the Department of Art History & Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis. gavinkroeber.com
Josh Levi is a graphic designer, photographer, writer, musician, and community builder based in St. Louis, Missouri. For more than 20 years, Josh has pursued his love for experimental music and curation through a series of DIY booking outfits, including his current project, Flood Yr Face. He was the co-founder of Select DC, a collective dedicated to bringing noise, techno, and avant-garde electronic music to Washington, DC, from 2013 to 2017. He is currently the public programs manager at Counterpublic. Josh has written for the Riverfront Times and Eleven Magazine and has been featured in the Washington Post and on Washington’s National Public Radio station WAMU. In 2023, his book Subterranean By Design was published by Snap Collective. The book compiles over 20 years’ worth of his photos, flyers, and snapshots of the American DIY Underground. Josh holds an A.A. in Graphic Design from the University of the District of Columbia. Josh is also a decidedly eclectic DJ, experienced collagist and visual artist, compulsive archivist, and habitual promoter. He serves as the Music Committee Chair and Vice President of the Board of Directors of New Music Circle, one of the longest-running presenting organizations for experimental and avant-garde music in the United States. www.joshlevi.net
Geographer and photographer Aaron Owens’ work focuses on marginal landscapes and the intersection of human and natural forms. Themes within his artistic practice often touch on questions of surveillance, the splintering of humans from nature in popular imagination, and what a holistic approach to modern ecology looks like on the ground and from above. After extensive academic and professional training in the field of geography, Aaron began to translate the observational and technical skills essential to the discipline into an artistic practice. www.instagram.com/owensaaron
VISITOR EXPERIENCE
The Tulsa Artist Fellowship Project Space (205 East Archer Street, Tulsa, OK 74103) is wheelchair- and stroller-accessible. It offers flexible seating options and designated standing areas. A family-sized private restroom is available to assist visitors with disabilities and caregivers needing extra space. Street parking is accessible via the Park Mobile App and is free after 5:00 pm and all day on Saturday and Sunday.