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Cauleen Smith makes films that treat imagination as a daily practice. Across three decades, she has returned again and again to speculative history and confabulation as ways of imagining Black ontologies—possible worlds that could exist alongside our ordinary reality. Moving between the everyday and the cosmic, her films draw on radical histories, experimental cinema, music, and science fiction to ask how images might not only reflect the world we inhabit, but help us imagine other ways of living within it.

This four-night survey opens with Drylongso (1998), Smith’s historic debut feature about a young woman photographing every Black man in Oakland as a form of protection and witness. From there, the program moves into Smith’s essayistic and archival work of the 2000s and 2010s, including The Fullness of Time and H-E-L-L-O, before arriving at a run of shorts that reimagine collective liberation through sound, procession, and myth: Space Is the Place (A March for Sun Ra), Crow Requiem, Pilgrim, Three Songs About Liberation, and Sojourner. The program closes with Smith’s most recent trio of works, The Volcano Manifesto: My Caldera, Mines to Caves, and The Deep West Assembly, which turn to geology and social landscapes as sites of conjectural history, extraction, and creation.

This survey offers a rare chance to watch Smith’s artistic vocabulary develop over time. Her structuralist and Third Cinema influences evolve into a singular, increasingly sculptural aesthetic, while her work remains grounded in a belief in utopian potentiality and a deep trust in the audience’s own ability to dream.

Thursday, August 20th – 7 pm: Drylongso (1998)

Friday, August 21st – 7 pm: The Fullness of Time (2008) + H-E-L-L-O (2014)

Friday, August 28th – 7 pm: Space Is the Place (A March for Sun Ra) (2011) + Crow Requiem (2015) + Pilgrim (2016) + Three Songs About Liberation (2017) + Sojourner (2018)

Saturday, August 29th – 7 pm: The Volcano Manifesto: My Caldera (2022) + Mines to Caves (2023) + The Deep West Assembly (2024)

Cauleen Smith (b. Riverside, California, 1967) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her BFA from San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, and her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Smith is the recipient of several grants and awards, including the 2022 Heinz Award; a Guggenheim Fellowship; the Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize; the Ellsworth Kelly Award; the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts; and a Rauschenberg Residency. Smith’s works have been featured in solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco;; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston; and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.. Her work is included in numerous public collections, such as the Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Studio Museum in Harlem; Smithsonian American Art Museum; and Whitney Museum of American Art. Smith is a faculty member in the UCLA Department of Art.

Cauleen Smith: A Survey of Films is organized by HR’s executive director, John Burple.