PHOENIX, ARIZONA.- The Heard Museum will open today the exhibition “Todd Defoe: Symphony in Stone,” on view through January 4, 2004. This is the first exhibit in a series of three artwork exhibitions that pay tribute to emerging contemporary Native artists. Ojibwe artist Todd Defoe creates exquisitely crafted musical instruments – both identifiable and fantasy –constructed of hundreds of glued and assembled inlays of stone. The glacier-hardened, clay-rich rock called catlinite, also known as pipestone, is quarried from tribal land in Minnesota where Defoe was born.

The Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, is a private, non-profit museum founded in 1929 by Dwight B. and Maie Bartlett Heard to house their personal collection of cultural and fine art.  More than seven decades of history have transformed the internationally acclaimed Heard Museum into what USA Today describes as "the nation’s most prestigious private Indian arts center."

The mission and philosophy of the Heard Museum today is to educate the public about the heritage and the living cultures and arts of Native peoples, with an emphasis on the peoples of the Southwest.