Join us on Sunday, November 3, 2024, Prospect New Orleans, in partnership with P.6 site Newcomb Art Museum (Tulane University’s Uptown campus), will host Tambourine Cypher Part I.  Tambourine Cypher Part I at Tulane University's Newcomb Art Museum will feature a panel of Gulf South artists and tambourine experts, including P.6 artist Ashley Teamer, Rosalie Washington, Gladney, and Aaron Washington. This event will explore the historical and cultural significance of the tambourine in New Orleans celebrations.

The tambourine instrument and its significance has reverberated across time and space –– traversing cultures and historic periods from 1700 BC Middle East to Amer-Indigenous instrumentation in the Western Hemisphere, and both sacred and secular music in the colonial and post-colonial Southern United States. P.6 artist Ashley Teamer will meld her expertise and interests  in sonic production, Gulf South history, and African descended cultural practices in the form of a beautiful tambourine tree in Lemann Park for this Prospect 6 season (The Future is present, The Harbinger is home).

Tambourine Cypher Part I will usher in the Prospect 6 season during the last day of opening weekend. There will be a panel presentation with Gulf South artists who are tambourine experts and culture bearers in distinct fields of African descended sonic significance in our city.

Registration is required. Ashley Teamer's Prospect.6 project is co-commissioned in collaboration with Arts New Orleans and the City of New Orleans Percent for Art Program.

Ashley Teamer’s collages explore the relationships between the body, nature, space, and time. These themes are represented by original snapshots and found materials that are sewn and glued together. As a visual artist and DJ, she uses sound to creatively intervene with indoor and outdoor architecture, revealing the malleability of our built environment. Teamer’s current work explores land and body as inseparable. Levees and seawalls create an illusion of separation and safety between civilization and the sea. Similarly, skin is perceived as a protective barrier that completely separates our internal organs from nature. However, consistent flooding and the ubiquity of cancer reveal that both structures are porous. Her work imagines a future where we live more harmoniously with water.  

Teamer received her MFA from Yale University in 2022. She has had solo exhibitions at Siena Heights University, Adrian, MI and 4th Ward Project Space, Chicago, IL. Teamer’s work has also been included in group exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; and Antenna Gallery, New Orleans, LA; among others. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ACRE, and Ox-Bow School of Art.

Aaron Washington (Guardians of the Flame)

Ms. Rosalie Washington (The Tambourine Lady)

Gladney, a sixth-generation native of the Lower 9th Ward, has been performing professionally since the age of 12. A graduate of the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) and the New School for Jazz & Contemporary Music, he was selected for the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz (now the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz) All-Star group, touring schools alongside jazz legends like Lisa Henry and Antonio Hart, and had the honor of performing at the White House during the Obama administration. Throughout his 18-year career, Gladney has performed internationally with renowned artists such as Jonathan Batiste, Ellis Marsalis, Branford Marsalis, Solange, and Topsy Chapman. He has also appeared on major TV shows including Live with Kelly & Ryan, Late Night with Seth Meyers, and BBC's The Graham Norton Show. Featured on Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah's GRAMMY-nominated album The Emancipation Procrastination, he now leads his own band, with their debut recording Selenite released in 2021, and is a founding member of The Rumble, a Mardi Gras Indian funk band. Gladney also plays regularly with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, tours globally with the Jake Shears Band, and serves as a woodwind instructor at NOCCA.

Kyle DeCoste (he/him) is a scholar of popular music from New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. He is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Music at Tulane University. His work, which is often collaborative and (auto)ethnographic, examines how sound—and popular music in particular—is used to articulate and contest ideas about race, gender, class, and childhood. He received his PhD in Music from Columbia University where his dissertation explored the poetics of childhood in contemporary Black American popular music to make a case for an imaginative twenty-first-century abolitionism. In addition to his dissertation, Kyle is working on two other book projects. The first which he is co-authoring with Alex Blue V, is an ethnography of country rap (a.k.a. “hick-hop”) that examines issues of race and place in the Southern United States. The second is a history of New Orleans’ only all-woman brass band, the Original Pinettes Brass Band, which applies a Black feminist lens to brass band performance.