Meet the Mentors | Elizabeth Newkirk
Graphic by Andy Zeng. Photo courtesy of Bow & Hammer.
The COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective is an online, 8-week fellowship program that allows creative writers, visual artists, and musicians to explore, illuminate, and grow through collaborating on interdisciplinary projects. Learn more about the Arts Collective here. For the next weeks leading up to the application deadline, we will be featuring mini-interviews with 2020 mentors.
About the Mentor
Entrepreneur, activist, and musician, Elizabeth Newkirk encompasses thoughtfulness and artistry in all of her work, performances, and collaborations. She is the co-founding member and pianist of Bow & Hammer, her primary ensemble. With Bow & Hammer, she explores her passion for duo repertoire of the early 20th century, while balancing it with new and standard works. Extremely inspired by the slow-food movement, she is dedicated to creating concerts that can mirror the thoughtfulness and thoroughness of the food movement, furthermore creating a relevancy for new audiences, meaningful experiences, and a camaraderie among other disciplines. “IndustryNight” and “Élevé ,” are just two examples of presentations by Bow & Hammer that feature a wide range of disciplines, artists, and small businesses in Chicago. Growing up on her family farm in Indiana, Newkirk came to Chicago to pursue studies in Piano Performance. She received her MM from Roosevelt University with a minor in Collaborative Piano where she studied with Ludmila Lazar, Dana Brown and Angela Yoffe. Receiving her BA from Columbia College, she studied under pianist/composer Sebastian Huydts and jazz with Dennis Luxion. Additionally, she has had the privilege to work with Mary Sauer, Cliff Colnot, and Sylvia Wang. Newkirk currently is on faculty at Columbia College Chicago.
CAC: What themes have you always aimed to explore with your art? What is a topic you want to explore with your art, but haven’t yet?
A: If I could identify a consistent theme, it would be collaboration. Interacting with other artists, mediums, and the community in which I live inspires me greatly. Hm, I don’t know a topic that I’m interested in exploring that is not on the horizon. The beauty of planning both short and long term is incorporating steps to include all of your goals and interests!
Elizabeth Newkirk, playing the piano, alongside Kathryn Satoh, playing the violin. Together, Elizabeth and Kathryn form the violin-piano duo Bow & Hammer. Here, they play Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel at Ovation Chicago in 2019.
CAC: If you have one piece of advice for emerging artists, what would it be?
A: Ideas, passion, originality...all are fleeting novelties if you cannot organize, plan, and implement into action nor if you cannot recognize your relationship to the past, present, and future.
CAC: If you were to summarize your latest work/project in less than ten words, what would they be?
A: Touring our series that collaborates with Chefs.
CAC: If you could have dinner with any artistic figure from any time period, what would you eat and with whom?
A: Maurice Ravel, and hopefully at his favorite cafe in Paris!
CAC: What are you most looking forward to as an Arts Collective mentor?
A: Hearing about the ideas and goals of the participants and hoping to provide any guidance that I can to improve efficiency, success, and authenticity.
Learn more about the Arts Collective here.
Apply to the Arts Collective here.
Patrick Tong is the outreach director for the Arts Collective. He is a high school junior from the northern suburbs of Chicago. His work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the Poetry Society of the UK, and appears in Eunoia Review and Rising Phoenix Review. Besides reading for COUNTERCLOCK, he currently serves as an Executive Editor for Polyphony H.S. and a copy editor for its affiliated blog, Voices.
Bow & Hammer: Sonata for Violin and Piano II