The Great Hall Exhibition Series, "Cauleen Smith in Conversation with Mabel O. Wilson"

June 3, 2021 at 6:00pm

Series: Great Hall Exhibition Public Program

Speakers: Cauleen Smith, artist, and Mabel O. Wilson, a Professor Architecture and Professor in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University, and the Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University.

Title: A Conversation between Cauleen Smith and Mabel O. Wilson

Description: Presented in conjunction with the current Great Hall Exhibition, Cauleen Smith, H-E-L-L-O: To Do All At Once, artist Cauleen Smith will engage in a conversation with Mabel O. Wilson, the Nancy and George Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, a Professor in African American and African Diasporic Studies, and the Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University. Smith’s short film, H-E-L-L-O, centers New Orleans’s cityscape and history of jazz performance through the lens of experimental film and science fiction in order to critique the racialized logics of the built environment and offer a possible salve through alternate modes of communication, creative practice, and placemaking. Wilson’s extensive scholarship on the racial dynamics embedded within architectural history and insistence on art’s ability to reflect incisive connections between race and architecture provides another inroad into contextualizing Smith’s long-standing examination of space both through film and her expansive multi-media practice. This conversation seeks to reaffirm these “spaceways”––Smith’s neologism for the physical environments that structure the navigation of the Black body through public spaces and historical memory.

Cauleen Smith (b. 1967, Riverside, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles. She was recently the recipient of a solo presentation at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Cauleen Smith: Mutualities (February 17, 2020 — January 31, 2021), as well as a major career survey organized by MASS MoCA, Cauleen Smith: We Already Have What We Need (May 25, 2019 — March 15, 2020). She has also had solo exhibitions at Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The High Line, New York; and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Her work is currently on view in a two-person exhibition with Theaster Gates at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her films, objects, and installations have been featured in group exhibitions including the 2017 Whitney Biennial and Prospect.4, New Orleans (2017). She has participated in group exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; New Museum, New York; San Diego Museum of Art; and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK. Smith is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including the 2020 Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize from The Studio Museum in Harlem, the inaugural Ellsworth Kelly Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Art in 2016, as well as the 2016 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Film/Video, Rockefeller Media Arts Award, Creative Capital Film/Video, Chicago 3Arts Grant, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Artadia, and a Rauschenberg Residency in 2015. Most recently, in 2019, Smith was an artist-in-residence at Artpace. Smith was born in Riverside, CA and grew up in Sacramento. She earned a B.A. in Cinema from San Francisco State University in 1991 and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1998. Smith studied with Trinh T. Minh-ha, Angela Davis, and Lynn Hershman Leeson at San Francisco State University. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2007. Smith is Professor at CalArts School of Art.

Mabel O. Wilson is a Professor of Architecture as well as a Professor in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. She also serves as the Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies and co-director of Global Africa Lab. She has authored Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2017), Negro Building: African Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012/21) and the volume Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020) with Irene Cheng and Charles Davis. With her practice Studio&, she is member of the architectural team that recently completed the Memorial to Enslaved African American Laborers at the University of Virginia. She is co-curator of the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021) currently on view at MoMA. She is a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?)—an advocacy project to educate the architectural profession about the problems of globalization and labor.