Variations on a Theme: Benjamin Patterson’s Scores

julia elizabeth neal specializes in modern and contemporary art of the United States, with an emphasis on African American art history. Her research considers relations between the visual and the conceptual to emergent politics of identity and (trans)nationalisms since World War II. She explores art as a discursive phenomena in service of nationhood and its social and cultural scripts. Her interests in disguised and disregarded forms of power also consider console gaming and constituent cultures of role-playing that model abstractions about individual and world affairs. neal is the author of Performance Works within the State of Benjamin Patterson: A Catalogue Raisonné Volume I (2021), a site-specific inventory of Patterson's Hamburg-based archive.

Valerie Cassel Oliver is the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Cassel Oliver has organized numerous exhibitions including the acclaimed Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970 (2005), Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image with Dr. Andrea Barnwell Brownlee (2009), Hand + Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft (2010); and Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (2012), which toured through 2015. Cassel Oliver has also mounted numerous solo exhibitions including a major retrospective on Benjamin Patterson, Born in the State of Flux/us, as well as the surveys Donald Moffett: The Extravagant Vein (2011); Jennie C. Jones: Compilation (2015); Angel Otero: Everything and Nothing (2016), and Annabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped (2017).

Tijuana-based composer, director, and artist Sean Franz Griffin, PhD, is the founder of Opera Povera, a consortium dedicated to new opera and interdisciplinary performance. Working often in creative nonfiction, Griffin's work spans composition, librettos, choreography, film, performance design, and drawing. His work has appeared at the Venice Biennale, MoMA, Volksbühne, and The Broad, including installations with Charles Gaines and Catherine Sullivan and operas with George Lewis, Ron Athey, and Pauline Oliveros.

Scott Worthington enjoys a diverse career as a musician in Los Angeles. A "masterful and transfixing" bassist (NewMusicBox), he performs as a soloist, in orchestras and recording studios, and with improvisors and chamber groups. As a performer-composer, his albums have garnered critical acclaim. Prism was named one of The New Yorker's most notable classical albums of 2015 and called "as bewitching as it is original" by Alex Ross. Scott's other releases have been praised by The New York Times ("continually surprises and delights with tiny, glittering events") and the National Sawdust Log ("quietly gripping"). He has received commissions from the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, Loadbang, the Isaura String Quartet, the Byrne:Kozar Duo, Synchromy, and numerous soloists. In 2025, his trio Triple Shot released their debut EP First Flight featuring compositions by all members of the ensemble.

New York-born, Los Angeles-based Peter Frank has guest curated exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, El Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Center for Inter-American Relations, the Alternative Museum, Franklin Furnace Archive, and the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, among others. He has realized projects for Documenta and the Biennale de Venezia. Frank has written extensively for Art in America, ARTnews, artillery, and Whitehot Magazine, and other periodicals and served as art critic for The SoHo Weekly News, The Village Voice, and LA Weekly.