Joshua Abrams & Sharon Udoh: Wonder Wonder
Saturday, September 26
TIME: 2:15pm - 2:45pm
VENUE: The Neubauer Collegium. 5701 South woodlawn ave.
In the fall of 2026, the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society will present Love Bless America, an exhibition of new works by the Brussels-based French artist and filmmaker Pierre Bismuth (b. 1963). The centerpiece of the exhibition is a long-form meditative film documenting the creative meeting between two leading figures from Chicago’s jazz and improvised music scene: Joshua Abrams and Sharon Udoh. Bismuth has tasked them with composing a 21st-century spiritual based on a lyrical hymn he wrote for the project. Bismuth’s double portrait traces both the magic and the workaday practice of “inspiration,” using the commingling of religious musical traditions as a point of departure for a multi-layered reflection on love, music, and the divine. Abrams and Udoh will be performing the resultant music as part of the opening of Pierre Bismuth: Love Bless America.
A photo of on the left Sharon Udoh’s arm and hand with blue finger nail polish resting on a piano; Joshua Abrams’s hand is also resting on the piano on the right side of the frame.
Joshua Abrams
Joshua Abrams (b. 1973) is a composer, bassist and improviser. His early formative musical experiences include performing in a chamber group conducted by Earle Brown and busking on the streets of Philadelphia as an original member of The Roots. He has been a key figure in Chicago’s creative music communities since moving here in the early 1990s. In 2010, Abrams founded Natural Information Society, a group that creates long-form psychedelic environments that join the hypnotic qualities of the guembri, a Gnawan lute, to a wide range of contemporary musics and methodologies including jazz, minimalism and experimental rock. Abrams has scored numerous feature films, and has also collaborated with visual artists such as Lisa Alvarado, Theaster Gates, and Simon Starling. He has appeared on over 100 recordings alongside many of the leading voices in contemporary improvised music.
Sharon udoh
Sharon Udoh (b. 1981) is a Nigerian-American pianist, improviser and hymnologist whose initial music training was shaped in large part by her membership in the Pentecostal Church. Udoh moved from Columbus, Ohio, to Chicago in 2022, and quickly immersed herself in the city’s prodigious experimental music scenes. She has been recording and performing with avant-rap group clipping. since 2019, and acts as a curator for the roving Pianist and a Partner Perhaps concert series that has seen her team up with Jim Baker, Chris Corsano, Erez Dessel, and Justin Dillard, among others. Udoh is a 2026 United States Artist fellow whose current projects include The Black Soaps, an episodic opera with Marvin Tate about Black Chicago domestic life; Potluck, her sextet with Angelo Hart, Fred Jackson Jr., Mabel Kwan, Avreeayl Ra, and Ken Vandermark; and her ongoing solo project American-African Hymnal, which draws from her deep relationship to hymnal literature in the United States.
This program is presented in partnership with the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago. The Neubauer Collegium cultivates new communities of inquiry at the University of Chicago. The faculty-led research projects bring together scholars and practitioners whose collaboration is required to address complex questions on any topic. Our Visiting Fellows program brings the most creative thinkers from around the world for collaboration, animating the intellectual and creative life on campus. The gallery presents contemporary art exhibitions in the context of academic research, and our public events invite broad engagement with the scholarly inquiries we support. The aim of these activities is to deepen knowledge about the world and our place in it.