As part of the 2023 Tennessee Triennial for Contemporary Art: RE-PAIR celebration across Tennessee, Cheekwood has acquired a grouping of three aluminum sculptures by Elizabeth Turk for the Ann & Monroe Carell, Jr. Family Sculpture Trail. Drawing inspiration from the songs of engendered Tennessee birds: the Red-cockaded Woodpecker, the Golden-winged Warble and the King Rail, the sculpture represents their songs through elegant totemic sound columns.

Turk commemorates the lost songs of endangered and extinct birds in her work by using printouts of the bird’s calls sound waves. Working with recordings archived by the Macaulay Library of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Turk enlarges the sound wave images, moves them from horizontal to vertical and then painstakingly reproduces them in a variety of materials to manufacture her totems. These towering vertical forms create a forest of fabricated objects where the lost voices of birds can be heard once more.

Cheekwood will celebrate the Tennessee Triennial for Contemporary Art: RE-PAIR and the Turk installation on the Ann & Monroe Carell, Jr. Family Sculpture Trail on Saturday, March 4.

Elizabeth Turk, known for her marble sculpture, Echoes of Extinction series as well as her immersive art events is a MacArthur Fellow, an Annalee & Barnett Newman Foundation recipient and a Smithsonian Artist Fellow, among other awards. Turk received her MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, Rinehart School of Sculpture in 1994, and her BA from Scripps College, Claremont, CA in 1983.