Denbo Event Opens Big Ears
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Denbo Event Opens Big Ears
February 27, 2025
Denbo Center hosts Fred Moten and Brandon Lopez at Big Ears Festival 2025.
The Denbo Center will host two events with Fred Moten and his performance partner Brandon Lopez in collaboration with the 2025 Big Ears Festival. Both events are part of the official festival lineup but will also be free and open to UT students and faculty and the general public.
The Denbo Center has fostered a relationship with Big Ears for several years, with director Amy Elias serving on the Big Ears executive board since 2021. These collaborative events resulted from two years of planning between the center, the festival, and the artists.
First, as part of the Denbo Center’s Distinguished Lecture Series, Moten and Lopez will present “’On the run from ownership’: Mackey, Music, Centrifugitivity” at 6 p.m. Thursday, March 27, in the Great Hall of the Knoxville Museum of Art.
Moten and Lopez will also be adding a sonic performance to the Big Ears Festival at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, March 29, also in the Knoxville Museum of Arts’s Great Hall.
The pair have collaborated on music together since 2018, including albums and performance projects like their June 2024 Silo City Reading Series, an immersive, multidisciplinary event at a complex of grain silos along the Buffalo River in Buffalo, New York.
Moten is an American cultural theorist, poet, and scholar whose work has created new paradigms in critical theory, Black studies, and performance studies. He is considered one of the foremost theorists of his generation. He is a professor of performance studies at New York University and a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of California, Riverside. He previously taught at Duke University and the University of Iowa.
Moten’s scholarly texts include The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study; In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition; and The Universal Machine. He has published numerous poetry collections as well as a children’s book and has performed onstage with numerous artists. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2020.
Lopez is a Puerto Rican/American bassist, composer, and improviser working at the fringes of contemporary music. His playing has led him to work with the luminaries of the contemporary avant-garde such as Moten, Gerald Cleaver, and John Zorn. He was a featured soloist with the New York Philharmonic and has been the recipient of numerous awards by organizations like the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Jerome Foundation.
For more information about these events, contact the Denbo Center at humanitiesctr@utk.edu.