Grant Recipients Alvin Lucier Award for Music Music/Sound 2026

Olivia Block

Headshot of Olivia Block looking directly at the camera. She is wearing a black shirt and a black vest. Behind her is dark fig color backdrop with wrinkles.
Photo by Lyndon French.
  • 2026 Alvin Lucier Award for Music
  • Music/Sound
  • Composer, performer, media artist, producer, educator
  • Born 1970, Dallas, TX
  • Lives in Chicago, IL
  • She/Her
  •  
  • Additional Information
  • oliviablock.net

Artist Statement

Composing with sound and music can give form to emotions and impressions that are otherwise difficult to articulate. Performing music acts as a kind of alternative non-political diplomacy, connecting cultures, cultivating peace, and opening up dialogue. While the style and presentation of my solo practice take many forms, a distinct emotional sensibility remains a consistent throughline. Research, lived impressions, and emotional intuition guide my process. My work often reflects interests in time, weather, animals, geology, and architecture, among other things.

- December 2025

Biography

Olivia Block is a media artist and composer. She has been a pioneer of experimental music since the release of her 1998 album Pure Gaze (Sedimental), which blends field recordings, electronic textures, and chamber music. Based in Chicago since the mid-1990s, Block has developed a sound practice that moves across a variety of modalities and genres.

In live performances, Block plays synthesizers, piano, voice, organ, and amplified objects to create works with rich sonic textures and fragmented moments of melody and harmony. Her multichannel concerts blend field recordings and synth tones in flocking masses that shift like weather patterns. Block’s installation work incorporates sound from sources as varied as human breath, oyster beds, and limestone caves, reflecting her sustained interests in site specificity, scales of time, archival materials, found sounds, and field recordings.

Block’s solo album, The Mountains Pass (Black Truffle, 2024), is a suite of songs inspired by the animal world and the landscapes of northern New Mexico. The album marks a shift in her work through the increased use of voice and percussion, with drums performed by Jon Mueller, layered among synthesizers, organ percussion, bells, and piano fragments. The compositions unfold as impressionistic sonic vignettes, while the lyrics conjure scenes including the landscape after a forest fire, or the northward journey of an endangered Mexican gray wolf. Block’s recorded output also includes Breach (Portraits GRM, 2025), Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea (Room 40, 2021), Dissolution (Glistening Examples, 2016), Karren (Sedimental, 2013), and more.

Block’s installation work has been presented internationally in galleries, universities, and public spaces, including the Richard H. Driehaus Museum, Chicago, IL (2025); the James Turrell Twilight Epiphany Skyspace at Rice University, Houston, TX (2023); the Nasher Sculpture Gallery, Dallas, TX (2022); the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, IL (2019); the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, Chicago, IL (2017); the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Chicago, IL (2017); Arthur Ross Gallery, Philadelphia, PA (2017); the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY (2017); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain (2016); and an abandoned sanatorium in Sokolowsko, Poland, presented as part of the A-i-R Sanatorium Sound Sokołowsko residency program (2016).

A front-side view of Olivia Block performing outdoors. She is looking down as her hands move over her electronic music equipment, which has a few green tape strips on its side and is illuminated by a flexible gooseneck lamp with an orange lightbulb. There are some blue and green lights hovering above her gear that seem to be originating in a synthesizer and then filtering through through the flash of the photograph. The orange lights emulate blobs and appear throughout. Block is wearing a black and blue patterned turtleneck, which foreshadows the blurry trees in the background.

Performance still from Breach at Casa del Lago, Mexico City, Mexico, 2024. Photo by Oscar Villanueva Dorantes.

Olivia Block looking down at her electronic equipment during an outdoor performance. To the right of Block is a flexible gooseneck lamp with an orange lightbulb. She is wearing a blue and black patterned turtleneck. Behind her are blurry trees.

Performance still from Breach at Casa del Lago, Mexico City, Mexico, 2024. Photo by Oscar Villanueva Dorantes.

Olivia Block is sitting in a (dark) room. There is a stage light directed at her as she looks down onto her table of electronic equipment, which has long cables going in and out of the gear, along with a plastic water bottle and a wine glass. To the right side is a piano with sheet music and a clipped vocal microphone.

Performance still from Northward at Fylkingen, Stockholm, Sweden, 2025. Photo by Valerie Mol.

Olivia Block mid-performance. She is sitting down in front of a piano that she is playing with one hand while singing into a microphone that hangs in front of her sheet music. There is a table of electronic equipment with a red beverage in a plastic bottle laid out in front of her. Wires are plugged into and coming out of her gear. Behind Block are room dividers, panels, and a bit of a wall that is lit up with solid blue, sea green, and purple projections, as well as white dots and white amorphous shapes. She is wearing a black turtleneck with a gold necklace over it.

Performance still from Before the Air Was Born at Taktlos Festival, Kunstraum Walcheturm, Zürich, Switzerland, 2025. Photo by Michelle Ettlin.

Projection of a ghostly moose on a bare wall of patterned wallpaper in the Nickerson Mansion Maher Gallery. Parallel to the projection, in the center of the room, is a pastoral sculpture. Under the projection, against the wall, is a dark wooden library shelving with glass cabinets, filled with thick colorful books. The library extends through the majority of the photograph. On the right side, next to the bookshelf is half of a fire place with iridescent stained-glass tile, framed by dark wood that covers some of the wallpaper. In front of the fireplace and bookshelf are terracotta runner rugs, framing the sculptural centerpiece.

Installation view of Lowlands at The Richard H. Driehaus Museum, Chicago, IL, 2025. Presented as part of A Tale of Today: Materialities, curated by Giovanni Aloi. Photo by Robert Salazar and Bob Heishman.

Official music video of Axiolite from Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea, Room40, 2021. Audio and video by Olivia Block.

Official music video for Northward from The Mountains Pass, Black Truffle, 2024. Audio and video by Olivia Block.

Video summary of Lowlands by Olivia Block, created for A Tale of Today: Materialities at The Richard H. Driehaus Museum, Chicago, IL, 2025.