A Conversation on Music

The acclaimed author, Vince Aletti, is arguably the first critic to write about the emerging disco scene in the early 1970s. His engagement with disco nightlife continued throughout his career as a curator, writer, and music and photography critic in New York City, New York. Aletti joins Contemporary Arts Museum Houston Curator Dean Daderko and artist Steven Evans, whose exhibition Steven Evans: If I Can’t Dance, It’s Not My Revolution! explores connections between music, language, memory, identity, community, and collectivity. Learn more about the connections between dance, music and activism, and enjoy some relevant musical interludes.

About Vince Aletti
Vince Aletti is a writer, curator, and critic whose work appears regularly in such publications as Artforum, Photograph, Apartamento, and Aperture. Aletti was art editor and photography critic of the Village Voice from 1994 to 2005 and reviewed photography exhibitions for the New Yorker’s Goings On About Town section from 2005 to 2016. He is the author of The Disco Files 1973-78: New York's Underground, Week by Week (2009, reissued 2018) and coauthor of Avedon Fashion 1994-2000 (2009) and has contributed essays to numerous publications on photography and fashion. In 2005, he won the International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Writing. Issues: A History of Photography in Fashion Magazines is due from Phaidon in April 2019. He lives and works in New York’s East Village.

About Steven Evans
Multimedia artist Steven Evans (b. 1961, Key West, Florida) works across a wide variety of media, including photography, sculpture, and painting. He currently serves as Executive Director of FotoFest International in Houston, Texas. His work was recently included
in exhibitions at CAM Raleigh, North Carolina and the Spiritmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden.
Steven Evans’s Song Title series presents the titles and lyrics to popular dance songs in a vivid array of vinyl lettering, latex paint, and neon signs. The work considers the layers of memory, history, and identity built around the songs, and how their isolated words can be reappropriated into the rhetoric of resistance.