Long Tone Exhibition & Listening Non Critique
End of Semester Events
Long Tone
Thesis Studio with David Gersten
Background Image: Detail of “The Draftsman’s House” by David Gersten, photo courtesy of David Gersten, 1991–1998 (cropped).
Fall: End of Semester Events
Long Tone:
Thesis Studio with David Gersten
We invite you to join us in celebrating this inaugural semester of Long Tone and the community that has grown through it. The culmination of the semester will unfold across two events: the Listening Non Critique on Friday, December 5, held in the Main Studios with two open sessions from 12 to 2 PM and from 2 to 4 PM; and the Long Tone Exhibition Opening: Final Works from the Semester Studio on Saturday, December 6, also in the Main Studios, from 5 to 7 PM. Participating members of the Semester Studio include Cory Bertelsen, Undine Brod, Meztli Castro Asmussen, Camille Coleman, Elias Dills, Sovereign Strickland, and Paria Shahverdi, whose work, questions, and explorations have shaped this first edition of the Long Tone studio.
Listening Non Critique
Friday, 5 December, 2025 | 12–2 & 2–4pm
End of Semester Exhibition
Saturday, 6 December, 2025 | 5–7pm
ALN Main Studios
1548 Burden Lake Road, Averill Park, NY 12018
This fall marked the inaugural semester of Long Tone: Thesis Studio with David Gersten, a new semester studio at Arts Letters and Numbers dedicated to practices of listening, deep attention, and cross-disciplinary exploration. Over the course of these twelve weeks, participants worked within an evolving framework shaped by questions rather than outcomes, presence rather than critique, and curiosity rather than certainty. The semester invited each person to construct their own trajectory of study, research, and making, guided by studio visits, conversations, seminars, readings, and the act of sustained listening that gives Long Tone its name.
As the first iteration of this studio, the Fall 2025 semester has been a place where a shared vocabulary began to form: a commitment to creative inquiry as a lived practice, the development of perceptual sensibilities, and the building of a community attentive to the nuances of each other’s work. Throughout the term, participants engaged in individual and collective investigations that crossed media and discipline. They shaped their own curriculum, met with visiting thinkers and practitioners, and continually returned to the core gesture of the studio: listening as a way of being in relation to one another and to one’s own work. This inaugural semester has also been a testing ground for what a semester-long studio at Arts Letters and Numbers can become. Long Tone has grown through studio visits, weekly gatherings, seminars, shared readings, improvisational sessions, research presentations, and periods of focused making. It has been a space where work could unfold at its own pace, where ideas could shift and reconfigure, and where each participant found their own way of inhabiting the openness of the studio.
As we arrive at the close of this first edition, we gather to celebrate the works, processes, and relationships that have taken shape. The events marking the end of the semester are an opportunity to share the constellation of practices that have emerged: works in progress and completed pieces, experiments, gestures, traces, and the inquiries that carried each participant through the fall. This moment is not only a presentation of results but a recognition of the time spent, the attention given, and the new pathways that have opened for each person involved.