How are cultural leaders and practitioners addressing artistic and organizational challenges today? And how do they make room for creative and institutional growth, while facing shifting audience expectations and consumer behaviors? In this series of interviews with Center grantees, we offer a look inside the organizational and artistic practices of many of Philadelphia’s leading cultural institutions and practicing artists, their distinct characters, aspirations, and more.

Here, we speak to Dustin Hurt, founder and director of Bowerbird, whose Center-funded project, Sound Machines: Kagel's Zwei Mann Orchester, was on view in May of 2018 in an exhibition and performances at Drexel University’s Pearlstein Gallery. The centerpiece of the exhibition was a large-scale kinetic sound sculpture conceived by Kagel that utilizes orchestral instruments, and household and found objects, connected through a network of levers and strings to encourage the viewer to imagine the hidden sound potential. This edition marked the US premiere of the work and only the fourth version ever created.

In the interview that follows, Hurt talks with us about his interest in experimental music and Bowerbird’s various cross-disciplinary projects.