This past December, poet Justin Phillip Reed took off his shoes on stage at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s Peter B. Lewis Theater—an auditorium in the round, part of Frank Lloyd Wright’s original design—and walked in a circle. As he enacted this “moving meditation,” the audience listened to a loop of his brother reciting an inspirational mantra, inter-spersed with a recording of his young nephew’s voice and Reed’s own live yogic breathwork.
Phillip’s spellbinding performance was part of “Spirit of Sound,” the final event in a special series that Taylor Johnson, the Guggenheim’s inaugural poet-in-residence, conceptualized and curated last year. An annual position that the
