Radio Producer, Oral Historian, Designer
Alex Hanesworth
Philly Gay News wrote about the PTOHP’s timeline zines here.
Art Daily wrote about the Ways of Looking project at the RISD Museum here.
Liza Yeager of Signal Hill wrote in their Inspirations newsletter (which you can subscribe to here):
My friend Alex Hanesworth makes audio tours for museums. They’ve been doing this for almost a decade now, since they were in college, and the tours they make have turned me into a true believer in the form: museum audio tours, I’m pretty sure, are a great, mostly untapped site of artistic possibility.
Case in point, this week, Alex told me about a new tour they worked on for an exhibit about art made with sealskins. It’s for the RISD museum, so I listened online. It’s a lush, poetic series of tiny audio stories, mostly non-narrated, built around the idea of the gifts seals give the people who live near them in the Arctic and Subarctic: Gift of Light, Gift of Nourishment, Gift of Warmth. It’s more like an experimental doc than a traditional audio guide. No mundane descriptions of objects here! Listening prompted me to go back to find an old tour of Alex’s, the one that first got me hooked on the tour-as-art idea, my true rec for this month. Also made for the RISD museum, it’s called, “Why Is This Even Here?” In just a few short stops threaded with jokes and interviews and freaky little historical anecdotes, the tour somehow manages to tackle the question of what an art museum is for—and what art itself is for, too. I haven’t been able to unstick the introductory anecdote, about a legal trial for a wooden carriage, from my brain for years. For bonus points in this genre, I’m personally meaning to revisit Nate DiMeo’s series of object stories from the Met residency he did in 2016. And one more Alex tour rec: I love this one, about the ecological and labor and cultural and personal histories of a legendary Rhode Island silver factory.