Center for Cavernous Listening

“a croak/makes a sign/makes a wail/makes a note”
– Dr. Clara M. Young-Kunstmann,
excerpt from field journal, 10:04pm, Sept. 2019

The Center for Cavernous Listening explores the transmissions of the rare Fermata Frog. The Fermata Frog is an amphibian notable for its ability to respond to human group vocalizations, interfere with radio frequencies, and metabolize environmental toxins including white phosphorus. Converted to a repository of sound, chalk, video, and works on paper, SPACE becomes a site to tune in, where listening stretches across time, histories loop back on themselves, the ground becomes wobbly, and improbable channels remain open.

Did you hear that?

Martha Schnee is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily across silkscreen printmaking, performance, drawing, and sound. She performs with her band/art collective sidebody and co-directs sidebody press. Her work explores sonic landscapes, traces and indexes of memory, speculative creatures, education systems, and the breakdown of language. She is drawn to moments where surfaces tune and speak, where erasure creates new lines, where the speculative becomes a form of truth, and performance becomes a method of inquiry/repair.

Her work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Boston Art Review, The Portland Press Herald, as well as with the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.  She has shown work at museums and galleries nationally and internationally, including The Parrish Art Museum (NY), Distillery Gallery (MA), Kunstraum Kreuzberg (Berlin), Aviatrix Gallery (Berlin), Field Projects (NY), Gallery 263 (MA), and more. With sidebody, she has performed at DIY venues across New England, as well as at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the Paradise Rock Club, and the 2025 Boston Calling Music Festival.

She received her honors B.A. in American Cultural Studies from Bates College, her Ed.M in Arts in Education from Harvard University, and her MFA in Painting from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts. Currently, she is a Visiting Lecturer in the Studio Foundation and Art Education Departments at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She lives and works in Somerville, MA with her cat Moses and a Passion Flower plant clone that has been in her family since the 1990s.