Terry Adkins’s body of work is concerned with the invisible histories that define African American legacies within mainstream American culture. Behearer II borrows its title from The Ear of the Behearer (1973), by jazz saxophonist Dewey Redman. Adkins created it after a lost sculpture of the same title in his exhibition Black Beethoven: Recital in Nine Dominions (2004), which examined the German composer’s possible Moorish ancestry, his deafness, and his genius. Composed of two antique sousaphone bells and a corrugated steel pipe typically used in air conditioning, Behearer II exemplifies Adkins’s practice of repurposing materials and narratives to invigorate them with new meaning and liberatory potential.