This fall, Baltimore-based sound artist, musician, and educator Andrew Paul Keiper will take up residency at Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Arts and Agriculture (PMRCAA). Keiper, who earned his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art’s (MICA) Photographic and Electronic Media program in 2016, brings a practice that spans sound design, experimental music, and visual art, with a focus on listening, noise, and the landscapes shaped by human and natural forces. He teaches in the Animation & Media Art department at MICA.
“Sound is, for the most part, the center of my practice,” he explains. Keiper’s work is rooted in history, memory, and place. “I have a collaborator and friend whose grandfather was in Hiroshima when we dropped the bomb and my grandfather helped to create it. We both focus on that theme, together and independently.”
This focus drew him to sites across the American West, to landscapes shaped both by the nuclear era as well as by volcanism. “Around 20 years ago, I first went to Oregon. I become obsessed with volcanoes and was painting them and thinking about them as kind of natural mandalas, where kind of opposites can come together and resolve,” Keiper recalls. “As I’ve been out West the last couple of years, and I’ve started to realize that a lot of sites of relevance to my work are located in landscapes formed by volcanism.”
Much of Keiper’s practice involves fieldwork. Talking about a project that he worked on two years ago Keiper shares, “My main goal was to go to places to make recordings. So I went to North Dakota, near Minot, where the B 52 bombers fly out of and recorded in a corn field. I went to the Hanford Site in Washington, where they bred the plutonium that was used in the Trinity Test, and the Nagasaki bomb.”
“So many of the places that my work addresses or that I travel to in making work are places that were used and abused by our government, in theory, on our [the public’s] behalf, but in most cases, without the awareness of the majority of the public. I think it’s important to bear witness and share witness to all of this, and art has the great power to get past the orthodoxy of our worldview and make you feel something.”
Keiper’s work has been recognized widely. He has exhibited in Baltimore, New York City, Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C., and in 2016 and 2019 was a semi-finalist for the Sondheim Prize. In 2016, he received a Rubys Artist Grant with collaborator Kei Ito, which led to the large-scale project.
During his residency, Keiper will present an artist talk titled Microphones and Fever Dreams on October 30, from 4-6 p.m. The talk will explore his artistic practice, the role of sound in understanding historical landscapes, and the fever-dream lens through which he approaches history and memory.
Community members are invited to attend Keiper’s artist talk on October 30, 4-6 p.m., at Pine Meadow Ranch. The event is free and open to the public, but reservations are required.
In addition to his artist talk, Keiper will participate in the Open Studio event at Pine Meadow Ranch on November 6, 2025, from 4-6 p.m., as part of the Roundhouse Foundation’s Open Studios series. The Open Studio will feature Keiper along with fellow residents Leah Crosby and Margot Boyer-Dry. The event is free and open to the public, though space is limited and registration is required.
