Cauleen Smith
Site: Fellowship
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 presents Sky Will Learn Sky, a new installation featuring texts drawn from the compositions of Alice Coltrane. Screened in parallel so that the sound echoes 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 is a moving presentation for post-uprising St. Louis offering a lightness of futurity emerging out of the legacies of struggle within the region.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Cauleen Smith 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. Drawing from structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction, she makes things that deploy the tactics of activism in service of ecstatic social space and contemplation. She lives in Los Angeles and is Art Program faculty at California Institute of the Arts. BA in Creative Arts from San Francisco State University and MFA, University of California, Los Angeles School of Theater Film and Television. Smith is the recipient of the following awards: Rockefeller Media Arts Award, Creative Capital Film /Video, Independent Spirit Someone to Watch Award, Chicago 3Arts Grant, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Chicago Expo Artadia Award, and Rauschenberg Residency, Herb Alpert Awards in the Arts in Film and Video 2016, United States Artists Award 2017, and was the 2016 inaugural recipient of the Ellsworth Kelly Award.
