In a recent conversation, the artist Tschabalala Self told me that the best performances she’d ever seen were on the New York City subway. Freestyle subway dancers are my personal favorite in this genre. Groups of mostly young Black men glide up and down the thin space of the carriage with athletic dexterity in between commuters sitting on plastic seats, swinging off the ceiling rails and spinning around the poles to music.

Kevin Beasley’s The Sound of Morning combines every aspect of his work to date—sculpture, sound, performance, and site specificity—in one totality. Staged at the crossroads of two Manhattan streets on the Lower East Side, Beasley plays the sounds of movement, object, and site—inserting sculptures made using everyday and industrial materials and objects, and performers—by using contact mics to magnify the faint noises that usually disappear into the white noise of Manhattan, creating a sonic sculpture.