artist, musician, curator
SoundSpace2015-148.jpg

about

Steve Parker is an artist, composer, trombonist and curator in Austin, TX. He is the recipient of the Rome Prize, the Tito’s Prize, a Fulbright, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

SoundSpace2015-148.jpg

Biography

Steve Parker is an artist, musician, and organizer based in Austin, Texas. He is the recipient of the Rome Prize, the Pollock-Krasner Award, the Tito’s Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is currently a McKnight Visiting Composer with the American Composers Forum.

Parker makes social sculptures: large-scale performances that facilitate meaningful exchanges between the public, densely-layered sculptural objects, and the environment. His projects include an outdoor opera for 1.5 million bats, megaphone choir, and echolocation devices; monumental ear trumpets inspired by obsolete WWII surveillance tools; an outdoor bird sanctuary made of acoustic mirrors, bird feeders, and 12th-century liturgical chants; cathartic transportation symphonies for pedicabs, automobiles, and bicycles; and sonic healing meditations played by NCAA marching bands. His work often situates the viewer as a performer, engaging them in new forms of listening.

Exhibition and performance highlights include the American Academy in Rome (Italy), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Arkansas), CUE Art Foundation (New York), the Fusebox Festival (Texas), Gwangju Media Art Festival (Korea), the Lincoln Center Festival, Los Angeles Philharmonic inSIGHT, the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), MASS MoCA (Massachusetts), Rich Mix (London), and SXSW. As a solo trombonist and as an artist of NYC-based "new music dream team" Ensemble Signal, he has premiered 200+ new works.

Parker’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Colossal, and Design Milk, among others. He is Executive Director of Collide Arts, curator of SoundSpace at the Blanton, and Associate Professor at UTSA. He holds degrees in Math and Music from Oberlin, Rice, and UT Austin.

parker cv


Recent / current projects

Weird Winter, The Blanton Museum of Art, Dec 2023

Golem, Sculpture Month Houston, Oct 2023

Listening Trees, City of Fort Worth, TX, Sept 2023

WAR TUBA, City of Albuquerque, NM, May 2023

Sonic Meditation for Solo Performer, Co-lab Projects & Fusebox Festival, April 2023

Sonic Meditation for Suspended Marching Band, Atlassian and Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, March 2023

FIGHT SONG, Art League Houston, Houston, TX, Dec 2022

Foreign Body, Ivester Contemporary, Austin, TX, Sept 2022

Human Stylus, Fusebox Festival, Austin, TX, April 2022

Sound Treatment, Sala Diaz, San Antonio, TX, Jan - March 2022

Foghorn Elegy, The Contemporary Austin, Austin, TX, Oct 2021 - Spring 2022


Steve is recalibrating our most profound relationships. There is something wholly ordinary about the sounds he documents, even—or especially—those separating life from death. If the bird will not stop to sing, so be it. Steve invites us to sit and wait for the next one to come along.
— American Academy in Rome Magazine
The generosity and respect with which Parker forms his connections — sonic, sculptural, conceptual — always includes his audience, and always invites them to create their own.
— Annelyse Gelman, Glasstire
Incredible, jaw-dropping soloist
— New Music Box
Steve Parker exemplifies the way contemporary artists push beyond the boundaries of genres and media towards the pursuit of creativity. His generous approach brings together groups of trained performers and even invites curious members of the public to participate in his scores.
— Andrea Mellard, The Contemporary Austin
There was only one possible criticism of the trombonist Steven Parker’s wonderful performance of Sequenza V: a sorry lack of clown shoes.
— David Allen, The New York Times
Music in a traditional auditorium is well and good, but if we’ve learned one thing from Steve Parker, it’s that all the world’s a concert hall. His boldness and fervor inspire us and carloads of other music lovers to go off-roading with him at every opportunity. Honk if you love Steve Parker!
— Austin Chronicle
Steve Parker’s musical instruments make no sound. Instead, this trombonist repurposes brass instruments as sculptural listening devices. His inspirations are the early-20th-century military sound locaters — some called war tubas — that were used to detect approaching enemy aircraft before the invention of radar. Parker’s instruments exude a similar gangly menace, with yards of Seussian tubing ending in the flared bells of trombones and sousaphones.
— Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, The New York Times