I was an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent village inn--a wholly new and rare experience to me. It was a closer view of my native town. I was fairly inside of it. I never had seen its institutions before. This is one of its peculiar institutions; for it is a shire town. I began to comprehend what its inhabitants were about.
- Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience”

Alan Michelson’s sound installation introduces the visitor to the night that Thoreau spent in jail for non-payment of taxes, in protest of the Mexican War, an event which is pivotal to the essay “Civil Disobedience.” Bars have been added to the window overlooking the rear of Glyndor House, with the staff parking lot and visitor restroom in the foreground leading to a sweeping view of the pergola and Wave Hill House in the distance. The visitor hears the sounds of a working kitchen (Wave Hill House kitchen), punctuated by the striking of a town clock. For most of his sheltered life Thoreau lived with his family or the Emerson’s, never far from Concord center. Yet in his account of his night of detention he marvels at the unexpected, closer view it afforded of his native town. Scholarship reveals that the night spent in jail was essentially unnecessary, the fee was paid by his aunt, but too late in the day for the jailer to release him. Yet this text, which influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., bears re-reading given the current state of the post-9/11 justice system with increased detainment and erosion of prisoner’s rights.

Alan Michelson signaled Thoreau in the title of his 1990 site-specific Public Art Fund installation, Earth’s Eye that denoted the location of Collect Pond, an essential fresh water source that settlers failed to protect from pollution from tanneries and encroaching urban life. Solo exhibitions include New Tribe: New York, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, New York, NY; NATIVity, Woodland Cultural Center, Brantford, Ontario; and Ganohonyohk, Art in General, New York, NY. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Imaging the River, Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY and the upcoming Atlas Americas in Brazil. He has received grants from the New York Community Trust, the Peter S. Reed Foundation, and a Visual Artists’ Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is working on a General Services Administration Art-in-Architecture commission for the US Port of Entry, Massena, New York, designed by Smith Miller + Hawkinson Architects. He received his BFA from Tufts University, Medford, MA and attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Columbia College. Living in the Boston area during the 1980’s he frequently swam in Walden Pond. Click to listen.