Talks & Conversations

Artist Talk: Ming Smith

Ming Smith, Sun Ra Space II, New York, New York, 1978, gelatin silver print, Charina Endowment Fund, 2017.42.1

In honor of the closing weekend of Photography and the Black Arts Movement: 1955-1985, join us for a conversation between exhibition artist Ming Smith and exhibition co-curator Philip Brookman. Their discussion will explore Smith’s creative practice and engagement with the Black Arts Movement. Smith’s works Prelude to Middle Passage (Île de Gorée, Senegal) and Sun Ra Space II, New York, New York are on view in the exhibition, which is the first to consider photography’s impact on a cultural and aesthetic movement that celebrated Black history, identity, and beauty.

This program is made possible by the James D. and Kathryn K. Steele Fund for Photography.

Ming Smith

artist

Ming Smith is a Harlem-based, Detroit-born artist. An alumna of Howard University, she was the first female member to join Kamoinge, a collective of Black photographers in New York in the 1960s working to document Black life. Smith would go on to be the first Black woman photographer to be included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Smith’s work was recently included in Soul of a Nation at Tate Modern in collaboration with the Brooklyn Museum, Crystal Bridges, and The Broad. Her work was also featured in the Brooklyn Museum’s We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 and MoMA’s 2010 seminal exhibition, Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography. 

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A woman plays an upright piano as two boys play checkers at a table in this horizontal painting. The scene is loosely painted with areas of flat color and pattern. The people have pale, peachy skin and dark brown hair. Their facial features are painted with dots or short strokes of black. The piano is against the wall to our left. The woman wears a short-sleeved, lemon-yellow dress with a long skirt. A music book is propped on the music stand, and loosely painted objects line the top of the instrument. The wall behind the piano is patterned with white and pale yellow flowers under and around arches against a cranberry-red background. The table where the boys play is in the middle of the room. The players sit in wooden chairs and wear black and white striped jackets with white collars. The boy to our right looks at the board while resting his left cheek, closer to us, in his hand. The other boy looks on with his arms on the table in front of him. The checkerboard sits on a red and white striped cloth, which has lines of black dots in the white strips. Beneath the table is a floral rug with blue and black flowers against a red background. The border is painted loosely with leafy shapes against bright white. Beneath the area rug the floor or another carpet is garnet red with a diamond-shaped grid painted in orange. A petal-pink, upholstered chair sits in front of a tall wardrobe in the back corner of the room. A picture with two violins against a blue background hangs on the side of the furniture to our right. A chest of drawers next to the wardrobe holds a few bowls or objects and a white statue, about half human height. The statue is of a person standing with one knee bent in front of the other, one elbow tucked by the side with that hand held to the chest, and the other bent elbow raised overhead. Pictures hang on the wall around the statue, and the wallpaper there is ivory white with a dark yellow pattern. The artist signed the work in the lower right corner, “Henri Matisse.”

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