Terry Adkins grew up in a segregated United States, an experience that made him acutely aware of the existence of parallel histories—one that informs the narratives of mainstream American culture and one comprising the legacy of Black lives. Believing in the emancipatory potential of art and music, Adkins developed bodies of work he called “recitals,” which explore the biographies of such diverse subjects as the abolitionist John Brown, botanist and inventor George Washington Carver, writer and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix, and Arctic explorer Matthew Henson. Behearer II—as well as its precursor, Behearer, conceived for Adkins’s solo exhibition Black Beethoven: Recital in Nine Dominions (Pageant: Soloveev, Philadelphia, 2004)—investigates Ludwig van Beethoven’s purported Moorish origins, embedding the inquiry within a meditation on the composer’s deafness. The title Behearer is borrowed from saxophonist Dewey Redman’s 1973 jazz record The Ear of the Behearer. Materially drawing from both the music and heavy industries, Behearer II is composed of two antique sousaphone bells, their openings facing each other, connected by a type of corrugated steel pipe typically used in air-conditioning systems. This simple construction, which resembles a strange hearing device, advances Adkins’s philosophy of reassociation and redefinition: the quiet presentation contrasts with the loud, brash qualities typically associated with brass instruments and industrial materials. The form recalls elephant masks used by the Babanki tribe of Cameroon to memorialize the dead. The Babanki consider the elephant to be a royal animal. By invoking this tradition, Adkins celebrates Beethoven’s illustrious status. cs & jr