2022 2022: Dr. Walker Peterson Downey Joins the CVPA

Art History Full-Time Lecturer, Dr. Downey joins us from MIT

Walker Downey is a historian of modern and contemporary art. He received his PhD from the History, Theory, & Criticism of Architecture and Art program at MIT in 2022. While anchored in art history, Walker’s research cuts across media studies, musicology, and sound studies. His primary focus is the contemporary field of sound art and its historical and technological roots. Walker’s additional research interests include changing public discourses around noise pollution, historical efforts on the part of artists and musicians to redefine notions of noise and silence, and collaborative relationships between artists and engineers of the postwar decades. 

Walker’s research and criticism has appeared in Art Journal OPEN, Art in America, Art Papers, and Interdisciplinary Science Reviews. In 2019, working with his MIT colleague Sarah Rifky, he co-edited the 47th issue of the MIT Press publication Thresholds, an annual peer-reviewed journal of art and architecture. He has co-organized major academic events, including the 2016–2017 Mahindra Humanities Center graduate conference “Technical Landscapes: Aesthetics and the Environment in the History of Science and Art” at Harvard University; and “Dissolve Music @ MIT” (2018). Additionally, he has lectured and presented on such subjects as contemporary sound artist Christina Kubisch, musician and experimental filmmaker Tony Conrad, and the unique historiographic challenges presented by sound art. 

Walker’s dissertation follows the intertwined trajectories of musicians Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016) and David Tudor (1926–1996) to understand how sound art evolved out of experimental music in the postwar United States. Substantially expanding the scope of Oliveros and Tudor’s legacies, long understood in purely music-historical terms, Walker shows that the pair’s engagements with electronic media—including magnetic tape, do-it-yourself circuitry, and biomedical devices—dramatically shaped their approaches to composition, performance, and listening in the Sixties and Seventies, yielding spatialized and participatory relationships to sound that challenged music’s definitional limits and transported them into art-world spaces. 

In a second, developing research project, he intends to craft an interdisciplinary history of the “soundscape” as term and concept, narrating its emergence in the North American context of Sixties-Seventies efforts to preserve an “acoustic ecology” endangered by industrial growth. This project would focus equally on the practices of environmentally oriented sound artists and musicians, and on government and activist campaigns for noise reform. Walker is currently preparing articles dealing with such subjects as musician Pauline Oliveros’s relationship to feminist performance art of the Seventies, and the racial and spatial politics of the white-noise machine.  

While at UMass Dartmouth, Walker is excited to develop courses oriented around the history, theory, and practice of sound art, the politics of listening and silencing in art, film, and performance, and artists’ relationships with emerging technologies from 1900 to the present day. He also hopes to plan programming highlighting sound art’s potential for environmental awareness, and to engage with sonic research and resources local to the Cape and South Coast regions—including the bioacoustics program at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s William A. Watkins Collection of Marine Mammal Sound Recordings and Data.