Drawing Sound with Morgan O’Hara

What does sound look like? The Rubin’s newest exhibition, The World is Sound, challenges us to listen with our whole body—even our eyes. Artist Christine Sun Kim’s works in the exhibition exemplify this notion, as her pieces visually depict sound from her perspective as a deaf person. Fellow artist Morgan O’Hara has spent her career conducting Live Transmissions—drawings she creates using a pencil in each hand and with her eyes on the movements of people in action, like poets, pianists, and orators. For this summer workshop, join O’Hara in the galleries as she takes her process a step further and guides us in drawing what we hear in The World Is Sound. It might change the way you think about and experience sound.

Materials will be provided.

This program is co-presented with the Drawing Center.

About the Instructor

Morgan O’Hara was born in Los Angeles, grew up in Japan, earned a Master’s Degree in Art from California State University at Los Angeles, and had her first solo exhibition in the Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts in Switzerland in 1978. In 1989, she began working internationally in performance art festivals; created her first site-specific wall drawings at De Fabriek in Eindhoven, the Netherlands; and began the practice of the Japanese martial art aikido.

Today, O’Hara teaches master classes in drawing and the psychology of creativity in art academies in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. She has completed many international residencies, including two sessions at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. O’Hara is also the recipient of numerous grants, and her work is in the permanent collections of galleries and museums around the world including the Czech National Gallery, Prague; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Metropolitan Museum, New York.

Image Credit

Drawing by Morgan O’Hara, (reproduced) with permission of the artist.