Laura Kuhn talks with Jade Dellinger, a long-time independent curator who since 2013 has been the director of the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida Southwestern College (formerly Edison State College) in Fort Myers, Florida. Over the past decade, Jade has produced a number of gallery exhibitions involving the work of John Cage, which we’ll cover across two programs – this evening is Part 1, and Part 2 will take place on Saturday, July 10. Two exhibitions to note: his 2012 exhibition for the Tampa Museum of Art entitled Things Not Seen Before: A Tribute to John Cage (with 33 1/3 – Performed by Audience), and his 2019 exhibition for the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery entitled JOHN CAGE: STEPS & OTHER WORKS FROM THE MOUNTAIN LAKE WORKSHOP, which was mounted with the able assistance of Ray Kass, long-time director of the Mountain Lake Workshop. Jade has had an amazing history and his arrival at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery was almost inevitable. We’ll cover much of the history this week (he has lots of stories to tell!) and delve more deeply into the exhibitions noted above next week.

All Things Cage is a weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world. If you’d like to propose a guest or a topic for a future program, write directly to Laura at lkuhn@johncage.org. She’d love to hear from you.

The late Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman once described his Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (Knopf, 2012) as the hardest book he’d ever written. This was because, as he put it, pick up any rock and there’s John Cage! Indeed, Cage was not only a world-renowned composer, numbering among his compositions the still notoriously tacet 4’33”, but a ground-breaking poet, a philosopher, a chess master who studied with Marcel Duchamp, a macrobiotic chef, a devotee of Zen Buddhism, a prolific visual artist, and an avid and pioneering mycologist. He was also life partner to the celebrated American choreographer, Merce Cunningham, for nearly half a century, and thus well known in the world of modern dance.

No wonder, then, that nearly everyone who encounters the man or his life’s work has something interesting to say about John Cage!