WHAT: Meet-the-artist event for Satch Hoyt, who is constructing "Celestial Vessel"

WHERE: Liberty Arts, 401-B Foster St. in Durham Central Park

WHEN: Today, 7 to 9 p.m.

ADMISSION: Free

ON THE WEB

www.satchhoyt.com www.myspace.com/griotsandcybercrooks

By Cliff Bellamy

cbellamy@heraldsun.com; 419-6744

DURHAM -- Satch Hoyt is a musician and visual artist who makes paintings and drawings, and sculptures and installations accompanied with soundscapes. His works, according to his Web site, are in different ways reflections on the African Diaspora "and its multifold consequences."

Hoyt this week began constructing a new sculpture titled "Celestial Vessel" that reflects those historical concerns, as well as his interest in music, particularly as manifest through the vinyl record, for decades the vehicle through which people heard music.

At the Liberty Arts studio this week, metal artists Jeremy Maronpot and Dan Furgurson -- Hoyt called them the "dream team" -- marked places on a large metal frame where metal ribs were to be welded. When finished, the metal structure will be an 18-foot canoe to which red, vinyl 45 rpm records will be attached. Hoyt said he will add a soundscape later, which is likely to include samples of the music on the records.

Duke University has commissioned "Celestial Vessel," which will be part of "The Record," an exhibit to open in August 2010 at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke. That exhibit will include works in various media by artists whose subject matter is records. (In addition to Hoyt, other artists in the exhibit will be Laurie Anderson, David Byrne and Christian Marclay.)

Hoyt was born in 1957 of a white British mother and father of African and Jamaican ancestry, hence his "connection to the diaspora is through my DNA." He grew up with vinyl records. He was a musician before be became interested in visual art (he is self-taught in both arts) and learned flute and percussion playing along with records. He continues to play music. Among other projects, he has a band called Griots and Cybercrooks. His influences are wide-ranging. He mentions Bob Marley, Stevie Wonder, Sun Ra and a modern Congolese band Staff Benda Bilili as artists who influence him.

"For me, the vinyl is a signifier and transmitter of information," he said. Records also came with colorful album cover art, and conveyed an experience many modern listeners have lost, he said. "You had this whole tactile experience related to the listening experience," he said, and listeners also enjoyed the imagery on the album covers.

As an artist, Hoyt said he likes to "mine history," and the records he will use in this sculpture are historical artifacts. RCA Victor's Red Seal Record series only lasted a few years, and Hoyt found some of the records, most of which have excerpts from classical works, in a flea market. "It gives me pleasure to find a material that few people have seen," he said of the vinyl. In the exhibit, the canoe will be displayed in a natural light that will show off the translucent red in the vinyl.

The canoe also was the vehicle that slave traders used to transport captured Africans to the shorelines where slave ships were docked. That fact gives the records a deeper symbolism. Hoyt said the sculpture traces the diasporic journey from canoe to slaveship, and "from slave ship to space ship." During the passage across the Atlantic, "the only thing you could take was music," he said. "So therefore music as a signifier that holds together a culture is what the record became."

Hoyt's other works explore issues related to the diaspora. "TheDonKingDom" uses boxing gloves in sculptures of various boxers. For the soundscape to that work, he used the sounds of Sugar Ray Robinson skipping rope and Muhammad Ali exercising on the punching bag. Another sculpture, "Kick It," deals with the prejudice that black soccer players in Europe often must endure. Hoyt uses a soccer ball and bananas, related to a practice in which soccer fans jeer and throw bananas at black players who do not perform well on the field.

He wants viewers who look at this work to question and perhaps become more interested in history, but he does not consider himself a political artist. "I'm not making protest art. I'm making layered art. I'm mining history.... Once it goes out there, it has a life of its own. I've given it a score to sing, and it sings on its own."

More information:

www.satchhoyt.com

www.myspace.com/griotsandcybercrooks