Milford Graves, PATHWAYS OF INFINITE POSSIBILITIES, 2017–18. Combined media sculptures. Installed alongside documentary footage and materials from Graves's studio and archive. Courtesy of the artist.
Milford Graves, PATHWAYS OF INFINITE POSSIBILITIES, 2017–18. Combined media sculptures. Installed alongside documentary footage and materials from Graves's studio and archive. Courtesy of the artist.
Milford Graves, PATHWAYS OF INFINITE POSSIBILITIES, 2017–18. Combined media sculptures. Installed alongside documentary footage and materials from Graves's studio and archive. Courtesy of the artist.
Milford Graves, PATHWAYS OF INFINITE POSSIBILITIES, 2017–18. Combined media sculptures. Installed alongside documentary footage and materials from Graves's studio and archive. Courtesy of the artist.
Milford Graves, PATHWAYS OF INFINITE POSSIBILITIES, 2017–18. Combined media sculptures. Installed alongside documentary footage and materials from Graves's studio and archive. Courtesy of the artist.
Milford Graves, PATHWAYS OF INFINITE POSSIBILITIES, 2017–18. Combined media sculptures. Installed alongside documentary footage and materials from Graves's studio and archive. Courtesy of the artist.
Milford Graves, PATHWAYS OF INFINITE POSSIBILITIES, 2017–18. Combined media sculptures. Installed alongside documentary footage and materials from Graves's studio and archive. Courtesy of the artist.
Milford Graves, PATHWAYS OF INFINITE POSSIBILITIES, 2017–18. Combined media sculptures. Installed alongside documentary footage and materials from Graves's studio and archive. Courtesy of the artist.
Milford Graves, PATHWAYS OF INFINITE POSSIBILITIES, 2017–18. Combined media sculptures. Installed alongside documentary footage and materials from Graves's studio and archive. Courtesy of the artist.
Milford Graves, PATHWAYS OF INFINITE POSSIBILITIES, 2017–18. Combined media sculptures. Installed alongside documentary footage and materials from Graves's studio and archive. Courtesy of the artist.
Milford Graves, PATHWAYS OF INFINITE POSSIBILITIES, 2017–18. Combined media sculptures. Installed alongside documentary footage and materials from Graves's studio and archive. Courtesy of the artist.
Milford Graves, PATHWAYS OF INFINITE POSSIBILITIES, 2017–18. Combined media sculptures. Installed alongside documentary footage and materials from Graves's studio and archive. Courtesy of the artist.
Milford Graves, PATHWAYS OF INFINITE POSSIBILITIES, 2017–18. Combined media sculptures. Installed alongside documentary footage and materials from Graves's studio and archive. Courtesy of the artist.
Milford Graves, PATHWAYS OF INFINITE POSSIBILITIES, 2017–18. Combined media sculptures. Installed alongside documentary footage and materials from Graves's studio and archive. Courtesy of the artist.
Milford Graves
I've been thinking about sculpture as a teaching tool. There's a saying I used to always hear: "sculpture is frozen music." I want something with some kind of movement to it. I'm adding elements that are not static, like transducers. I also use my years and years of experience in music and my training in martial arts to understand sculpture. There were movements I used to do that would be very quiet, maybe something from aikido or tai chi. Very slow, very slow... then all of a sudden you would burst out with this explosive, passive-aggressive energy. I wondered how I would put that into a piece of sculpture. I thought the explosion would be to put together some unorthodox elements and have contradictions set in. If a person were to look at it, it would provoke a kind of psychological motion inside of them.
How does this venture into the world of visual art relate to how you've gotten into the other disciplines from music to herbalism, martial arts, and biological research? How does this venture into the world of visual art relate to how you've gotten into the other disciplines from music to herbalism, martial arts, and biological research? On the surface they may seem different. The similarity I see is the amount of focus. That’s in all of 'em, you know? And dealing with a challenge. The basic foundation is the whole. I don't look at what I do in a piecemeal way—as, say, another piece of sculpture, or inserting an acupuncture needle into the body, or dealing with a very delicate herbal mixture. They're all approached the same way, but expressed differently.
I'm trying to compress something that's kind of expanded now. I aim to have this total respect as far as time is concerned, for what the ancients did, what elders did, and what we're presently doing or possibly can do—how everybody has something to contribute. At one point I was doing something with the telegraph device and the slit drum. I said to myself "They're using a binary system here, but on the slip drum they have more melodic content instead of just long and a short, that's the difference between the two of those." So it has a more musical contact, the way they did it in the Congo. The way I play the drums is dealing with quantum computing, in which we have the zero and the one, or zero or the one, and so on—the qubit. Between the binary concept and the quantum concept, I'm thinking about computation. But I’m trying to compress these ideas to get people to understand. It becomes about the practical aspects—being able to feel these concepts, not just by doing calculations.

I was actually thinking about that today. I said to myself "How would I say this is an all-inclusive thing?" You should never close your eyes to things that seem to be antique or out of date. And it’s similar to what people are saying in quantum mechanics. I began thinking about the terms "wormhole" or "parallel universe." To me, it's not about seeing a mirror image of yourself. If I went from one universe to the other, it could still be me—but I got to that other universe; I’d want to see more of my human potential. I don't want to see myself as the same in another universe. I’m trying to say that this is about a way to obtain a kind of elevated self, a greater human-potential. When people look at this sculpture and think about getting sucked into a black hole, or a wormhole, they’ll see they just have to be open.
Milford Graves (b. 1941, Jamaica, Queens) is a percussionist, acupuncturist, herbalist, martial artist, programmer, and professor. A pioneer of free Jazz, Graves was a member of the New York Art Quartet, whose iconic first recording in 1964 featured LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) reading his poem "Black Dada Nihilismus." In 1967, he played at John Coltrane’s funeral. A consummate autodidact with a syncretic approach, Graves invented a martial art form called Yara based on the movements of the Praying Mantis, African ritual dance, and Lindy Hop in 1972. Shortly thereafter, Graves joined the Black Music Division at Bennington College, where he taught for 39 years and is now Professor Emeritus. In 2000 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and began to study human heart vibrations to better understand music’s healing potential, and in 2015 he received the Doris Duke Foundation Impact Award. He is the subject of a critically acclaimed, feature-length documentary, Milford Graves Full Mantis (2018), directed by his former student, Jake Meginsky, with Neil Young. Additional notable recordings include In Concert At Yale University (with Don Pullen, 1966); Dialogue of the Drums (with Andrew Cyrille, 1974); Babi (1977); Meditation Among Us (1977); Real Deal (with David Murray, 1992); Grand Unification (1998); Beyond Quantum (with Anthony Braxton and William Parker, 2008); and Space/Time Redemption (with Bill Laswell, 2014). He continues to live and work in South Jamaica, Queens in the home that formerly belonged to his grandmother.
Library Live Milford Graves Mixing Skylight Website