Cauleen Smith—In Space, In Time
On the heels of her recent appointment at UCLA and critically acclaimed solo exhibitions at Morán Morán Gallery and LACMA, the UCLA Film & Television Archive and Hammer Museum are proud to present three nights of work by Los Angeles-based artist Cauleen Smith, including a rare performance of her evolving Black Utopia LP (Thursday, March 9, 2023) and two programs of short films (Friday and Saturday, March 10 and 11, 2023) at the Billy Wilder Theater inside the Hammer Museum. Smith will be in person on all three nights.
Smith, one of the leading American artists of her generation, defies easy categorization. Moving compellingly between multimedia installations, slide performances and a wide variety of films, Smith creates nuanced portrayals of African diaspora culture and its troubled history in the United States, as well as the issues facing Black women in contemporary life.
In July 2022, Smith was awarded a professorship at the UCLA Department of Art. Her previous appointments include positions as a visiting artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a faculty member of California Institute of the Arts, and a faculty member at the Vermont College of Fine Arts low-residency M.F.A. program.
Smith’s recent exhibitions in Los Angeles include Give It or Leave It at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2020-21 and My Caldera at Morán Morán Gallery in 2022. Her previous solo exhibitions have traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, MASS MoCA, the Art Institute of Chicago, Institute of Contemporary Art in Pennsylvania, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Her recent two person exhibition with Theaster Gates at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Future Histories: Theaster Gates and Cauleen Smith) “display[ed] Smith’s ability to be an activist while still being an artist,” per Moksha Akil’s review for the Musée Magazine.
Smith’s films, objects, and installations have been featured in group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial, Prospect 4 New Orleans, Studio Museum Harlem, the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, the New Museum in New York, and BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, UK. Additionally, her films have screened at the New York, Rotterdam, Sundance and many other international film festivals.
This year, Smith will be awarded the Heinz Award which she adds to her slate of accomplishments, including a United States Artists Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize from the Studio Museum in Harlem, the inaugural Ellsworth Kelly Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Herb Alpert Award for Film/Video, Rockefeller Media Arts Award, Creative Capital Film/Video, Chicago 3Arts Grant, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Artadia, a Rauschenberg residency, and an Artpace residency.
Cauleen Smith’s tenure in Los Angeles already promises an unparalleled quality and quantity of a diverse body of work, beginning with her three nights of programming at the Hammer Museum.
Program Details:
Cauleen Smith—In Space, In Time
In person: artist Cauleen Smith; program curator Steve Anker; independent curator Jheanelle Brown; and Alena Williams, assistant professor in the department of visual arts at UC San Diego
Thursday, March 9, 7:30 p.m.
Program 1: Black Utopia LP Performance
In its first Los Angeles presentation since 2013, Black Utopia LP combines 35mm slide projection with the artist's own vinyl LP into a 90-minute 'film without film' that is both a passionate reflection and a mashup of contemporary African diaspora culture. Originally created in 2012 during a residency with Chicago’s Threewalls Gallery and most recently presented in the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Black Utopia LP emerged from Smith’s extensive research on Afrofuturism. The performance involves history, music, outer space and African divination, and it especially serves as an homage to the great avant-garde jazz musician Sun Ra. Each time the piece is performed Smith creates new slides pertaining to the political moment and current locale, and tonight’s version includes material recorded in Los Angeles. These location-specific images are added to a pool of several hundred slides, including objects found in archives or appropriated from occult, astrological and historical sources. Smith's double LP Black Utopia is a collage of lectures, rehearsals and live performances by Sun Ra as well as commissioned contributions from Chicago artists Krista Franklin and Avery R. Young.
Friday, March 10, 7:30 p.m.
Program 2: Short Films - Black Echoes and Imperatives
A program of nine films that circle around urgent Black voices both real and imagined, ranging from the present to the past and from renowned political activists to artistic visionaries. Included are H-EL-L-O (2014), which re-envisions a somewhat revived New Orleans through a series of musical street tableaux; one of Smith’s earliest and best-known films Chronicles of a Lying Spirit by Kelly Gabron (1992); the poignant and elegiac Crow Requiem (2015); the redolent utopian testament Pilgrim (2017); ; and 3 Songs About Liberation (2017), Human 3.0 Reading List Biblio (2015-16), Sine at the Canyon & Sine at the Sea (2016), The Name You Trust in Good Clean Family Fun (2011) and T Minus Two (2010).
Saturday, March 11, 7:30 p.m.
Program 3: Short Films - Epochal Cultures – Chicago and New Orleans
Smith portrays two vital Black urban cultures, Chicago and New Orleans, through several fantasy and documentary films that focus on creative personalities and locations that are vital to these great cities. Included are selections from Smith’s The Way Out is the Way Two (2012), a cycle of fourteen musical and philosophical short pieces made in Chicago; her little seen, richly expressive short feature, The Fullness of Time (2008); and the astonishing interventionist Space Is the Place - A March for Sun Ra (2011). The program will begin with the premiere of Smith’s newest film, My Caldera (2022).
