Written by Ellen Wadey on viewing "A Musical Metamorphosis: Photographs from 1979-2015," Logan Center for the Arts, October 2015

Black & white work feels like a pause, the breath in. Color work is the movement, the breath out and out and out. Color work is saints and angels, halos emanating out. The black and white is the flesh. The spirit is seen in the subjects through their faces and hands and eyes. The placement of the hands on the instruments is transfixing, like the faces and hands of holy statutes. The subjects (in color) are electric. They can’t be caught still. It’s like what is inside them doesn’t only come out through the instrument, it’s all around them. It’s how they are in the world not just what they perform. Your hand in the layering and juxtaposition of the work maps the plain of sound and air and space and movement between the artist and the audience. The Nicole Mitchell piece sounded like her to me. Like an audiogram, but not a literal translation. My favorite corner of the exhibition was Malachi Favor Maghostut to Tomeka Reid. I loved the straightforwardness of the Malachi work and the quiet windowpanes of Reid. She was like a Madonna.