Claremont, CA— The Benton Museum of Art at AV is pleased to announce both the acquisition of three works by the contemporary artist Cauleen Smith and an exhibition that celebrates them: Transmissions, or these histories we lest not forget. Transmissions, guest-curated by Jheanelle Brown, features Smith’s film Sojourner (2018) and two works on paper, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2019) and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2019). The exhibition places these acquisitions in dialogue with additional works by Sophia Nahli Allison and Madeleine Hunt Ehrlich that honor the legacies of historical Black female visionaries. The exhibition runs from February 8 to July 23, 2023.
“Cauleen Smith is an important voice of our time. It has been an honor and a pleasure to collaborate with her in a number of contexts over the years, and I am especially delighted to bring her work to the Benton,” said Victoria Sancho Lobis, the Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel ’23 Director of the Benton. “Our academic and resident communities will certainly benefit from the opportunity to see Smith’s provocative and inspiring film Sojourner in the broader context of her drawings and the work of compelling contemporary artists.”
The centerpiece of the exhibition is Smith’s Sojourner, a 22-minute film that visualizes the transmission of the radical ideas of the Shaker and astral traveler Rebecca Cox Jackson (1795–1871), the swamini Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda (1937–2007), and the Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist lesbian organization that promoted intersectionality in its landmark statement of 1977. In Smith’s hands, their messages of social and spiritual liberation are conveyed to contemporary women of color via the Watts Towers and the Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Art in Joshua Tree, California.
The film is accompanied by two of Smith’s gouache drawings from 2019 that represent the covers of Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route by Saidiya Hartman and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe. These drawings are part of Smith’s BLK FMNNST Loaner Library 1989–2019, a larger bibliographic project that commemorates the authors and ideas that have intersected with and inspired the artist’s thinking. The film and the drawings are emblematic of Smith’s research-based artistic practice in which memoir, memory, history, and historiography are re-examined and invigorated in the service of new models of public and personal deliverance.
Rebecca Cox Jackson’s words find a visual corollary in Sophia Nahli Allison’s The Rapture or a Resurrection (2019), a part of a larger photographic series and film project called Dreaming Gave Us Wings. Represented here by a digital film still projected on a fabric sheet, the series gives form to Jackson’s ecstatic visions of astral travel and transcendent experience as well as the myth of the Flying Africans, who were reportedly able to break free of their shackles and fly back to Africa. The work is exhibited here for the first time.
Similarly drawing on history and mystery, Madeleine Hunt Ehrlich’s Spit on the Broom is an 11-minute surrealist video that pays respect to the clandestine United Order of the Tents, an organization of African American women formed during the existence of the Underground Railroad.
Together all of these works celebrate Black female revolutionaries and carry their words, ideas, and ideals into the present and future. Transmissions highlights the continuous line of faith, rapture, and liberatory potential that connects today’s artists with yesterday’s prescient visionaries.
Curated by Jheanelle Brown, guest curator
About Cauleen Smith
Cauleen Smith (born Riverside, California, 1967) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. Operating in multiple materials and arenas, Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film. Her films, objects, and installations have been featured in group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial (2017), Prospect 4, New Orleans (2017), Studio Museum Harlem; the Contemporary Art Museum Houston; the New Museum, New York; and BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK. She has had solo exhibitions at MASS MoCA; the Art Institute of Chicago; Institute for Contemporary Art Pennsylvania; the Museum of Contemporary, Chicago; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and a two-person exhibition with Theaster Gates at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Smith is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including the 2022 Heinz Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2020 Wein Artist Prize from the Studio Museum in Harlem, the inaugural Ellsworth Kelly Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Art in 2016, the 2016 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 in 2015 and recently in 2019, Smith was an artist in residence at Artpace.
About the Curator
Jheanelle Brown is a film curator/programmer, educator, and arts administrator based in Los Angeles. Her curatorial practice creates frameworks to explore the boundlessness of Black life in experimental and nonfiction film and video, and she has specific interests in the relationship between musicality and cinema, and political film and video. Her exhibitions and programs include Time Is Running Out of Time: Experimental Film and Video from the L.A. Rebellion and Today (2019) at Art + Practice; Our Documents (2019) at Residency Art Gallery; Deconstructing Portraiture: Embodied Landscapes (2018) and The Site of Memory: Enframed Histories as Ritual (2017) for Los Angeles Filmforum; and now is the time to dream (2020) for REDCAT. She recently served as guest co-curator for Black Radical Imagination: Fugitive Trajectories, which screened at the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, articule gallery, and Project Row Houses, among other institutions. Brown was a 2019 Flaherty Curatorial Fellow and a 2021–2022 Jamaica Art Society Curatorial/Writing Fellow. A board member and programmer for Los Angeles Filmforum, she is currently on faculty at the California Institute of the Arts and Otis College of Art and Design. She received her BS from the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and her MA from the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
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About the Benton Museum of Art at AV
Now housed in the new Benton Museum of Art designed by Machado Silvetti and Gensler, AV’s collection of art numbers 18,000 objects, including Italian Renaissance paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation; works on paper, including a first edition print series by Francisco Goya given by Norton Simon; and works in various media produced in Southern California in the twentieth century. In keeping with AV’s reputation as a leading center of the visual arts, the collection also includes works by such esteemed alumni as Chris Burden ’69, Marcia Hafif ’51, Helen Pashgian ’56, Peter Shelton ’73, and James Turrell ’65. Recognized globally for its commitment to contemporary art, the museum is the home of The Project Series, which has featured more than 50 contemporary Southern California artists since it began in 1999. Through its collaboration with students and faculty, the museum encourages active learning and creative exploration across all disciplines of study within the liberal arts context.