Kith & Kin | Melissa Foss Artist Talk

Kith & Kin: A Rewilding of Sound and Form

Exhibition On View: March 14 – April 18, 2025
Exhibition Opening: March 14, 6-9pm
Instrument Demo: March 22 & 29, 7pm
Artist Talk: April 10, 6:30pm

Kith & Kin, A Rewilding of Sound and Form is an immersive and multisensory exhibition where sculptural ceramic instruments, musical compositions, and multimedia installations invite us to connect with the profound beauty of our living world and explore our relationships with the more-than-human beings who are our kin.

Melissa Hyatt Foss

Melissa Hyatt Foss is an interdisciplinary artist who uses clay and sound to cultivate awe and connection through hand-built instruments, musical compositions, live performance, and community engagement.

Through these different but interrelated channels she explores sound itself; its ability to ground us in presence in our bodies, and its power to generate collective moments of shared emotion.

Her ceramic instruments, which are the center of her practice, celebrate ancient sound technologies of the Americas by reimagining them through the lens of personal narrative and regional mythology.

Melissa received her training in Pre-Columbian instrument-making in Argentina, developing her career as a performer, instrument-maker, researcher, and teaching artist for nearly a decade in connection with the National University of Argentina at Tres de Febrero.

Ellen Hoobler

Ellen Hoobler has been the William B. Ziff, Jr., Curator of Art of the Americas at the Walters Art Museum since 2023, after joining the museum as Associate Curator in 2017. She is working, with co-curator Patricia Lagarde, on the first permanent installation of the Walters’ Latin American collection, which will opens May, 2025.

Hoobler is the author of numerous publications, most recently The Spirit Within: Art and Life in Latin America / El Espíritu Inherente: Arte y vida en Latinoamérica, the Walters’ first English-Spanish bilingual catalogue (2025), and an essay on Zapotec tombs of Monte Albán (Oaxaca, Mexico) in the publication Figuración humana en Mesoamérica: Arqueologia, iconografia y lecturas (2024). Prior to coming to the Walters, Hoobler was a professor at Cornell College in Iowa.