Sky Will Learn Sky

In the spacious ceiling of Fellowship, a former church turned seedbed for music, hospitality, and radical gathering run by St. Louis label Farfetched, Cauleen Smith presented Sky Will Learn Sky, a commissioned installation featuring texts drawn from the compositions of Alice Coltrane. Screened in parallel so that the sound echoed throughout the building is “Sojourner” (2018), a film that navigates four distinct universes: musician Alice Coltrane (1937–2007) and her ashram; a 1966 photo shoot by Billy Ray at the Watts Towers; Noah Purifoy (1917–2004) and his desert assemblages; and Black spiritualist Rebecca Cox Jackson (1795–1871) and her Shaker community. For Smith, each of these sites embodies an act of creativity and radical generosity rooted in current events and social communities, allowing her to reimagine a future that is Black, feminist, spiritual, and unabashedly alive. Rooted in the processional protest banners of her earlier work, Sky Will Learn Sky was a moving presentation for post-uprising St. Louis offering a lightness of futurity emerging out of the legacies of struggle within the region.