HPPAA Featured Interdisciplinary Project · The People’s Gallery 2026–2028
Three
Turnarounds
A jazz-born abstract work by Hank Hehmsoth, selected for the City of Austin’s People’s Gallery at Austin City Hall.
Jazz · Visual Art · Improvisation
Musical movement translated into abstract visual form
Three Turnarounds translates musical motion, repetition, and improvisational structure into abstract visual form. The work is part of Seeing Sound / Hearing Color — Digital Jazz Sketches, a series exploring how rhythm, gesture, memory, and sound can leave visual traces through color and layered digital composition.
The title invokes the jazz turnaround: a passage that closes one cycle while preparing the next. Curving forms, repeated arcs, and sudden marks carry that sense of return—familiar motion altered by each new encounter.
The creative cycle
Three movements. One continuing act of attention.
Listen
Musical form begins in attention: pulse, interval, density, space, recurrence, and surprise.
Transform
Rhythm, gesture, memory, and improvisational choices accumulate as color, texture, and layered motion.
Return
The finished image becomes a new prompt for looking, listening, conversation, and creative response.
Selected artwork
Three Turnarounds
The artwork supplies the visual energy; the page leaves room to slow down and experience its layered arcs, interruptions, and shifting fields of color.
An HPPAA interdisciplinary arts project
Part of Seeing Sound / Hearing Color
Created by jazz pianist, composer, improviser, and visual artist Hank Hehmsoth, the project moves between artwork, listening, performance, exhibition, and participation. The works are not literal illustrations of songs; they are visual residues of attention and improvisational practice.
The City of Austin presents the People’s Gallery at Austin City Hall to showcase local artistic excellence and cultural diversity in a public civic setting. Three Turnarounds was selected for the 2026–2028 exhibition.
Visit · Look · Listen
See the work at Austin City Hall
Join Austin’s creative community for the opening reception, or visit during the exhibition period through May 2028.