Meet the Artist: Ted Riederer

March 2024—A “one-time refugee from punk and sometime band member,” Ted Riederer melds his musical passion into art. Armed with painting supplies, electric guitars, amplifiers, record players, photography equipment, a vinyl record lathe, and long-stemmed roses, he marries visual and audio concepts into stunning displays of contemporary art. Having ambled artistically from the Americas to the Antipodes, Riederer’s work has been shown nationally and internationally including exhibitions at PS1, Prospect 1.5, Goff and Rosenthal Berlin, Marianne Boesky Gallery, Context Gallery (Derry, Ireland), the Liverpool Biennial, and the Dhaka Arts Center (Bangladesh) to name a few. 

One of artist Ted Riederer’s most renowned works which has traveled globally, the Never Records project, will be part of an upcoming exhibition at Sarasota Art Museum. At its core, Never Records celebrates vinyl recordings as the gold standard in the world of recorded music. Riederer pairs vinyl’s implicit value with his version of the gift economy, resulting in a pop-up recording studio set up in an exhibition space, where local musicians or sound artists make appointments to come in, record a song, and then watch as their performance gets cut into a vinyl record—actually two records, as one stays behind within the growing library of records that Riederer and Never Records have produced over the years.

The Never Records project has traveled from New York, to Liverpool, to Derry, to New Orleans, to Texas, to Amman, to Kansas City, to London, to The Brooklyn Academy of Music, and now to Sarasota.

As one of the 10 artists featured in Sarasota Art Museum’s upcoming exhibition Impact: Contemporary Artists at the Hermitage Artist Retreat, where Hermitage alumni explore how their art reflects current cultural and social climates and challenges, Ted Riederer invites the community to come together for a hands-on experience of making their own vinyl records in the Never Records pop-up music studio.

On view from March 10–July 7, visitors can see Ted Riederer’s works in-person at Impact: Contemporary Artists at the Hermitage Artist Retreat at Sarasota Art Museum. 

“Impact: Contemporary Artists at the Hermitage Artist Retreat” is organized by Sarasota Art Museum in collaboration with the Hermitage Artist Retreat and curated by Dan Cameron, independent curator.