Michael Ned Holte is a writer and independent curator based in Los Angeles.
He is the author of Good Listener: Meditations on Music and Pauline Oliveros (Sming Sming Books, 2024). Good Listener is a response to Oliveros’s Sonic Meditation XXI—a text score in the form of a question: “What constitutes your musical universe?” Holte responds to this seemingly simple five word prompt with a daily meditation that focuses attention on the work of Oliveros—the revolutionary composer, feminist and queer icon, and Deep Listening theorist, but expands outward to consider the author’s own evolving relationship to music and sound. As a performance that documents its own making, the text also serves as a reflection on time, memory, improvisation, silence, solitude, loss, friendship, teaching, visual art, taste, technology, and material culture, among many other subjects summoned in its daily pursuit.
Along with Fiona Connor, he is editor of the Varese Group Pamphlet Series, for which he authored Bog Time (2022), a pamphlet on the early tape and synthesizer music of Pauline Oliveros. He has written monographic essays on artists including Charles Gaines, Richard Hawkins, Alice Könitz, Shio Kusaka, Caitlin Lonegan, Roy McMakin, Steve Roden, Clarissa Tossin, and Shirley Tse; his critical essays have appeared in periodicals such as Afterall, Artforum, Art Journal, East of Borneo, Frieze, Poetry, and X-TRA. He is a recipient of the Creative Capital Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant.
His exhibition, “how we are in time and space: Nancy Buchanan, Marcia Hafif, Barbara T. Smith,” at the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, was named by Hyperallergic as one of the top 50 exhibitions of 2022. In parallel, he organized a program of time-based “Annotations” by Neha Choksi, Gabrielle Civil, Patricia Fernández, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Kang Seung Lee, Babsi Loisch, Matt Siegle, Jennifer West, The Feminist Center for Creative Work, and The Revolution School.
Previous curatorial projects include “Routine Pleasures” at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, Los Angeles (2016); “TL;DR” at Artspace NZ, Auckland (2014); and “Made in L.A. 2014” (with Connie Butler) at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, all with accompanying publications. He has also organized solo exhibitions by Candice Lin and Aram Saroyan.
Holte serves on the artists’ advisory board for the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (ICA LA). He has also been on the board of directors of the Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound (SASSAS) and is a founding member of the Varese Group.
Holte joined the Program in Art as visiting faculty in 2009 and regular faculty in 2011. His CalArts courses have included “The Contemporary Exhibition,” “Performing Life,” “Modes and Forms of Criticism,” “Pieces,” “Routine Pleasures,” “Resistance to Work,” “Pauline Oliveros for Artists,” and “What’s Up with the L-Shape?” His areas of inquiry include the history, theory, and criticism of contemporary art; Southern California art history; exhibition making and history; microinstitutions and alternative spaces; performance; experimental music and sound.
