Exhibitions

Robert Hilton: Soundweaver is the first comprehensive exhibition dedicated to the Altadena-based outsider artist and instrument maker Robert S. Hilton (b. 1948). Over a fifty-year career, Hilton has created sculptural musical instruments from repurposed wood, gourds, guitar strings, and found materials, merging assemblage, performance, and experimental sound. Hilton’s practice complicates conventional boundaries between sculpture, music, craft, and pedagogy. Yet, his contributions remain largely underrecognized within the canon of postwar American art in Los Angeles.

Soundweaver reflects the breadth and complexity of American art by situating Hilton within histories that often ran in parallel but rarely intersected in scholarship: Black Arts Movement networks, West Coast assemblage traditions, experimental instrument-making, and community-based arts education. Hilton’s sculptural instruments challenge rigid distinctions between folk art and modernism, craft and sculpture, and performance and object. In situating his work within these overlapping genealogies, the exhibition expands dominant narratives of American art to include practices rooted in material improvisation, vernacular knowledge, and Black experimental traditions.

Did You Study with Robert Hilton?

In preparation for Hilton's upcoming exhibition, we’re gathering memories, stories, photographs, artwork, and other materials from Robert's former Armory students. We'd love to hear from you! Click below to share.

Robert Hilton: Soundweaver is made possible with generous support from the Michael J. Connell Foundation. Lead support for all Armory programs comes from the Perenchio Foundation. Exhibition public programs are supported, in part, by California Community Foundation and The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation.