Gallery Talk and Performance: NEA Jazz Master Marilyn Crispell on Cy Twombly
NEA Jazz Master Marilyn Crispell leads a gallery conversation on Cy Twombly's work, followed by a quartet improvisation performance in Griffin Court. Free for Illinois residents.
Why we picked this
Crispell is one of the last living architects of the free jazz tradition, and her quartet's approach to long-form improvisation has direct kinship with the way Twombly layered gesture and repetition on canvas. The pairing earns its premise.
At the Art Institute of Chicago, NEA Jazz Master Marilyn Crispell arrives to do something rare: talk about a visual artist whose work she understands through sound. The evening begins at 5:30 PM with a gallery conversation in Gallery 297, where Crispell discusses Cy Twombly’s paintings and their connections to music — to gesture, improvisation, and the space between intention and mark. At 6:30 PM, the event moves to Griffin Court for a performance by her quartet: Crispell on piano, Jason Stein on bass clarinet, Damon Smith on double bass, and Adam Shead on drums. Admission is free for Illinois residents through the museum’s Third Thursdays program, with advance reservations required at sales.artic.edu.
Crispell has been one of the central figures in the tradition of free improvisation since her time at the Karl Berger Creative Music Studio in the 1970s, developing a playing style that is simultaneously precise and unbounded. Her quartet, formed in 2023 at Damon Smith’s invitation, is devoted to what they call “long-form collective improvisation, extended formal development, and deeply relational listening” — a practice documented on spi-raling horn (Irritable Mystic Records, 2024) and Live at the Hungry Brain (Trost Records, 2025). Cy Twombly, whose canvases blend writing, drawing, and painting in swirling repetitions that resist easy reading, is an apt subject: both the music and the art resist summary.
The partnership with the Art Institute and WDCB 90.9FM makes this feel like the kind of event that could only happen in Chicago — a jazz master in dialogue with a towering visual artist, inside one of the great museum spaces in the country, at no cost. ASL interpretation and assisted listening devices are available with two weeks’ advance notice.