At the Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian’s design museum, situated in Andrew Carnegie’s 1902 mansion on upper Fifth Avenue, the warm light bouncing off the parquet floors and coffered oak ceilings can make visitors feel as if they were floating inside an enormous Scotch-and-soda. On a recent Wednesday, the opera singer Davóne Tines experienced a similar feeling of dislocation, when he beheld, in the spot where Carnegie’s dining table once stood, a painstakingly accurate re-creation of Tines’s own childhood living room, from rural northern Virginia. The display was one of twenty-five exhibits in an upcoming show called “Making Home.” “This is surreal!” Tines boomed. He had sent a slew of reference photographs to the museum’s curators in the past year, but he was seeing the cozy array of striped couch, white carpet, end tables, and upright piano in their final positions for the first time.
Tines’s rebooted living room is set about two feet off the floor, on a plinth that is on rockers—the artist Hugh Hayden’s attempt to illustrate how Tines, who spends three hundred days a year on the road performing, links the word “home” to balance and stability.
The Cooper Hewitt had invited Tines to come by when the museum was closed to visitors in order to put accent pieces in their proper positions, so that technicians could later mount them in place. Standing before two tables covered with books and picture frames, Tines told a curator, “It’s like you pillaged the house in Virginia. These are the exact same hymnals that are on our piano. And this is a version of the cantata that I stole from the Harvard library—I mean, the one I borrowed and haven’t returned yet.” Tines, who is six feet two and thirty-seven years old, had on Versace shorts, Balenciaga sneakers, kneesocks, and an abundance of pearl jewelry, including earrings and a pinkie ring. Unsure where to begin, he asked the curator, “So, how do we do the do?” Given free rein, Tines grabbed two songbooks and yelped, “It’s like a game show!”
In a private preview before the show’s November 2nd opening, Tines will sing while standing on the living-room plinth, accompanied by his grandparents, who raised him and fostered his love of music. It would not be eccentric to consider Tines’s singing gospel hymns with his relatives—who are descended from enslaved people—on an unstable surface in a mansion on Fifth Avenue as another in a series of musical provocations. In “Robeson,” a one-man show about Paul Robeson that Tines conceived with the director Zack Winokur, he sings an a-cappella version of “Some Enchanted Evening” while reënacting Robeson’s attempted suicide in a Moscow hotel room. In his 2018 show “The Black Clown,” Tines stared down audience members while repeating the line “You laugh / Because I’m poor and Black and funny / Not the same as you.”
Positioning a lamp on an end table, Tines said that the work of the director Peter Sellars, his colleague and champion, had deepened his love of staring at audiences. “Standing in front of someone and making eye contact should not be seen as confrontation,” he went on. “We are literally here together in this space. You literally paid to see me, so I’m looking at you.” Shortly after Tines graduated from Juilliard, he auditioned for Sellars and the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho by performing the spiritual “There Is a Balm in Gilead” and a spoken-word cantata based on Homer. Sellars immediately offered him a starring role in Saariaho’s opera “Only the Sound Remains.” Tines said, “In that one instant, I was hired to make my débuts at the Dutch National Opera, the Finnish National Opera, Teatro Real, in Madrid, Lincoln Center, and the Palais Garnier. It blew my mind.”
Although he has an apartment in Baltimore—which he shares with his sibling—Tines mainly lives out of hotels. “You form little rituals,” he said. “Like, when you arrive, you have to turn on every light in the room. It’s very important that you leave the room and then return to it in the same day, so you think of the room as someplace that you go to. And incense—crucial for the olfactory component. If you smell it in the room, it ties that room to other spaces you’ve smelled it in.”
After Tines had spent an hour moving objects around, Carlos Soto, a creative director who was working on another exhibit in the show, stopped by to say hello. Tines said of the fake living room, “It’s uncanny, because it really feels like home.” Soto cast a diagnostic eye at the exhibit and offered a suggestion. “It needs, like, a cough drop on the floor,” he said. Tines whooped in approval. Soto added, “Or a Werther’s Original, without the wrapper.” ♦
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