For Stan Douglas‘s twelfth solo at David Zwirner, the artist will debut a new film set in a reconstruction of the Columbia 30th Street Studio. This legendary recording studio, known as one of the finest in the world, was opened in 1949 by Columbia Records in an abandoned Armenian church on East 30th Street between Second and Third Avenues in Manhattan. Nicknamed “The Church,” it was home to some of the most renowned recordings of the era up until its closure in 1981, including Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959), Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited (1965), and Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979). Other artists using the studio were Leonard Bernstein, Johnny Cash, Aretha Franklin, Glenn Gould, Billie Holiday, Vladimir Horowitz, and Charles Mingus, among many more, with musical genres ranging from classical to musicals, jazz, pop, and rock.

-David Zwirner

Image: © Stan Douglas