Jeff Arnal is a percussionist and the Executive Director of Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Executive Director in Asheville, NC. He has been active as an artist, curator, and community organizer since the 1990s. In 2002, he co-founded Improvised and Otherwise, an interdisciplinary festival for emerging artists in Brooklyn, NY. He has performed in a wide variety of concerts and festivals, including a series of duo concerts with Charles Gayle in 2002, a trio concert at the Vision Festival with John Dierker and Gordon Beeferman in 2008, and his percussion duo with Michael Evans, performed live on WFMU radio and at the Issue Project Room in 2009. His collaborations with choreographers have been produced at PS 122, Joyce SoHo, Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church, The Chocolate Factory, and Judson Church. Arnal's music can be heard on a number of independent record labels, including Transit and Quadrologues with Seth Misterka, Reuben Radding, and Nate Wooley on Clean Feed, and Astral Chronology with John Dierker on Mahakala Music. In 2023, he toured and recorded in Germany and Lithuania with pianist Dietrich Eichmann. Arnal studied music with composer Stuart Saunders Smith and visionary artist Milford Graves and holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Maryland and an MFA in Music from Bennington College.
Listen to Jeff's 2021 radio interview with Mike Watt (Minutemen/Firehose) on the Watt from Pedro show.
Curt Cloninger is an artist, musician, writer, and Associate Professor of New Media at the University of North Carolina Asheville. His art uses an array of media combinations to undermine language as a system of meaning in order to reveal it as an embodied force in the world. His art work has been featured in the New York Times and at festivals and galleries from Korea to Brazil. Exhibition and performance venues include Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Granoff Center for The Creative Arts (Brown University), Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art (Chicago), Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (Asheville), and the internet. Curt has been published on a range of topics, including new media and internet art, installation and performance art, experimental graphic design, popular music, and network culture. His fifth and most recent book is entitled, Some Ways of Making Nothing: Apophatic Apparatuses in Contemporary Art (Punctum Books, 2021). His essays have been published in Performance Research, Intelligent Agent, Mute, Paste, Tekka, Rhizome Digest, A List Apart, Textshop Experiments, and on ABC World News.
Curt's art, music, and writing may be accessed at lab404.com, playdamage.org, and deepyoung.org.
