“Pilgrim” and “Crow Requiem”: Screening and Talk with Cauleen Smith
Live transcription is avaialble here.
Cauleen Smith’s short films “Pilgrim” (2016) and “Crow Requiem” (2015) offer two journeys through Black presence and history, provoking viewers into an experience of time and place that exceeds habitual borders.
In “Pilgrim,” viewers experience a live recording of an Alice Coltrane piano performance accompanied by a visual track that documents a pilgrimage across the U.S. taken by Cauleen Smith, tracing historic sites of creativity and generosity that were an inspiration to her: Alice Coltrane’s Sai Anantam Ashram; the Watts Towers; and the Watervliet Shaker Historic District.
“Crow Requiem” opens up a poetic narrative space to reckon with anti-Black violence through an homage to crows, commonly known as tricksters and harbingers of death, and less known for their remarkable intelligence and complex social lives. Cauleen Smith pays homage to a particular population of crows she encountered on their migration path between Syracuse and Auburn, New York, cities that were key stations on the Underground Railroad, and the birthplace of stereoscopic photography.
Following the screening will be a conversation with Cauleen Smith and Tina Campt.
This event is part of the 46th annual Scholar and Feminist Conference: Art and Political Imagination.
Accessibility
Live transcription and ASL interpretation will be provided. Please email any additional access needs to ekausch@barnard.edu.
This event is free and open to all. RSVP here.
About the Speakers
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 these disciplines while offering a phenomenological experience for spectators and participants. Her films, objects, and installations have been featured in group exhibitions. Studio Museum of Harlem, Houston Contemporary Art Museum; Yerba Buena Center for Art, and the New Museum, New York, D21 Leipzig and Decad, Berlin. She has had solo shows for her films and installations at The Kitchen, MCA Chicago, Threewalls, Chicago. She shows her drawings and 2D work with Corbett vs. Dempsey. Smith is the recipient of several grants and awards including the Rockefeller Media Arts Award, Creative Capital Film /Video, Chicago 3Arts Grant, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Chicago Expo Artadia Award, and Rauschenberg Residency. Smith was born in Riverside, California and grew up in Sacramento. She earned a BA in Creative Arts from San Francisco State University and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Theater Film and Television. Smith is based in the great city of Chicago and serves as faculty for the Vermont College of Fine Arts low-residency MFA program.
Tina Campt is Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media. Campt is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art. One of the founding researchers in Black European Studies, her early work theorized gender, racial, and diasporic formation in black communities in Europe, focusing on the role of vernacular photography in processes of historical interpretation. Her books include: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (University Michigan Press, 2004), Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (Duke University Press, 2012), and Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017). She has held faculty positions at the Technical University of Berlin, the University of California, Santa Cruz, Duke University, and Barnard College. Campt serves as a Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg. At the Cogut Institute, she leads the Black Visualities Initiative.