Courtesy of Danyelle Morgado

Music filled the galleries of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) as excited guests gathered for the most recent performance of the “Music at the Museum” series.

The series is hosted by Beckwith Artist-in-Residence and Director of the Bowdoin Orchestra George Lopez, who curates and performs a program inspired by exhibitions on show at the BCMA.

This edition was created based on “Gordon Parks: Herklas Brown and Maine, 1944.”  Lopez performed a series of pieces and was joined by his partner, acclaimed pianist Gulimina Mahamuti, throughout.

As Lopez planned for the event, the Gordon Parks exhibition felt like a natural choice.

“I meet with the directors of the museum, and we talk about what exhibits we might like to or they might like to highlight, or that I might be interested in. It’s very much a dialogue,” Lopez said. “The Gordon Parks exhibit is so historic and so powerful, it was kind of a no-brainer that [it] would be the one I would speak to first before it leaves the museum on November 9.”

Gordon Parks emerged as a particularly intriguing subject for Lopez when he discovered the photographer’s connection to music.

“[Parks was a] musician himself, apart from being a world-renowned and world-class photographer and filmmaker. I was able to track down music that he actually wrote, so [I included] one of his tunes,” Lopez said.“[I am] really tracking his life through music…. Some of the pieces I’ve chosen have to do with location, like where he grew up, what music he might have heard or what music was relevant for that particular time. It’s also music representative of what his experiences were, so maybe more in the mood or atmosphere of what was going on in America in the 1930s and 40s.”

Lopez performed a diverse set of pieces tracing Park’s journey through the United States and the political, social and cultural forces he engaged with. One of the pieces selected was Morton Gould’s “Boogie Woogie Etude,” which works to bring these issues to light.

“[A boogie woogie], historically, is indicative of railroads. At one point in Gordon Parks’ life, he was a waiter on a train that went from St. Paul, [Minn.] to Seattle.… This particular boogie woogie is a critique of railroad culture. [It acknowledges] the people who are overworked and underpaid, who are hurt,” Lopez said. “It’s an interesting sort of sociological critique through music, because there’s a tradition of boogie woogie that you dance and you sing and you enjoy.”

The entire curation process excited Lopez, who emphasized his interest in exploring the visual artists of the exhibition he is inspired by.

“My favorite aspect, from a purely personal point of view, is discovering the creativity of artists that I really never heard of before [or truly explored].… This allows me to dig in much more deeply into what motivates and inspires an artist to make the art that they make,” he said. “So the research process is very exciting for me. I love that. I love history. I love creativity and the creative process in general, no matter what the genre of art, dance, theater, what have you.”

Lopez tries to provide audiences with a fresh perspective when selecting pieces.

“The challenges are exciting. The simplest thing I could do, for example, would be to play music of the period. And I do that…, but I also try to find more creative [approaches],” he said.“The word chromatic comes to mind: Something that doesn’t quite fit on the surface, but through dialogue and lecturing … [gives] the audience a different way of experiencing the exhibit through sound.”

Lopez works alongside BCMA staff to bring his performances to life. BCMA Co-Director Frank Goodyear shared his appreciation for the interaction between visual and other artistic forms, especially in the case of the Parks show.

“There are so many ways in which the arts can activate moments in our past or can serve as a springboard for larger issues of the past or even of the present,” he said. “This is an exhibition that explores a very specific group of photographs that Gordon Parks made here in Maine in 1944. I think that music has a way of revealing a new kind of insight into this person and into this particular moment in time.”