With Resonant Spaces: Sound Art at Dartmouth, co-curator Spencer Topel and I had several goals. The first was to introduce the Upper Valley to sound art, a medium that had never been exhibited in the area. The second was to show the diversity of the practice and to include artists from a range of backgrounds who are at different points in their careers. Our final goal was to look at the interaction between sound and site. The exhibition took place in seven geographically distinct locations across the Dartmouth campus and the town of Hanover, New Hampshire, all within walking distance from one another. Five sites were public spaces, indoor and outdoor, and two were indoor galleries. With the exception of a selection of works by the late Terry Adkins, each of the works displayed in Resonant Spaces was created specifically for its location. This led to a series of questions: How did the public nature of these sites make the work more or less accessible? How may the sites themselves have shaped audience response? How did the type of sound employed play into these factors? Is a college campus a good—even an ideal—place for this medium, or in some ways is it a more challenging venue than a conventional gallery or civic museum space? What curatorial particularities exist in creating an exhibition of sound art on a college campus?

This essay organizes the works in Resonant Spaces within three categories of pairings: works installed in public spaces versus those in gallery locations,1 works with a strong visual component versus those with a minimal or no visual component, and works that were interactive versus those that were more passive. Each of these factors contributed to the audience’s response to the works and to the works’ ultimate success.

Resonant Spaces ran from September 15 through December 10, 2017, and the artists whose works featured in the show included Terry Adkins, Bill Fontana, Christine Sun Kim, Jacob Kirkegaard, Alvin Lucier, Laura Maes, Jess Rowland, and Julianne Swartz. Because the show was so heavily composed of new commissions, our curatorial approach emphasized the artists’ identities rather than the individual works exhibited. This was evident in the brochure design—in particular, in the images we included (when the brochure was produced the works had not been completed yet, so we did not have photography)—and also in the installation design of Hood Downtown,2 the main exhibition space and introduction to the show (fig. 1). This served to highlight the diversity of individuals, and therefore of approaches, ideas, and conceptions of sound art.