Carolyn Lazard: Long Take

August 6–December 13, 2026

Cantor Arts Center, Lynn Krywick Gibbons Gallery (210)

This installation begins with a score for a performance. Like sheet music for a dancer, a choreographic score uses notation to describe steps, movement, and timing. From this point of departure, Long Take unfolds as a series of gestures that engage accessibility and access infrastructures as artistic material.

For the central work, Leans, Reverses (2022), Carolyn Lazard collaborated with dancer Jerron Herman and poet and artist Joselia Rebekah Hughes. They created a dance video, drawing from the legacy of collaborations between dancers like Merce Cunningham and video artists like Nam June Paik who, in the 1960s and 1970s,  began using the screen rather than the stage as a mode of presentation. Replacing the camera with microphones, Leans, Reverses emerges from the fluid relationship between the performance, its sonic recording, and its transcription. Composed of Lazard’s original movement score, the sound of Herman's performance of the score, captions, and audio description, the work creates a sensorial blur of language, sound, vibration, and breath. Rather than replacing the visual, this work questions sight as a primary means of aesthetic experience, asking us to question our expectations of how art is perceived through a vital insistence on access.

The installation includes two additional site-specific works created at the Cantor based on Lazard’s instructions, as they are created anew at each showing. Institutional Seat (2022) modifies a standard bench from the museum’s galleries into a more comfortable version for all museum visitors, adding a backrest and providing a more relaxed sitting angle. Surround Sound (2022) covers the gallery floor with traditional dance flooring material. Over the course of the exhibition, this surface will collect marks made by visitors’ shoes, strollers, and wheelchair treads, like another form of tally or notation.

Carolyn Lazard (b. 1987) is a New York-based artist whose primary medium is iteration. They also work across video, sculpture, installation, and performance. Their practice attends to what incapacity makes.

Carolyn Lazard: Long Take is organized by the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, presenting work originally co-commissioned by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania; and Nottingham Contemporary, and is curated by Christina Linden, Director of Academic and Public Programs, Cantor. We gratefully acknowledge support from The Lynn Krywick Gibbons Gallery Exhibitions Fund at the Cantor Arts Center.