Cauleen Smith: Mutualities

Cauleen Smith creates work that reflects on memory and Afro-diasporic histories, by drawing on experimental film, non-Western cosmologies, poetry, and science fiction.

The exhibition at the Whitney presents two of Smith’s films, Sojourner and Pilgrim, each in an installation environment, along with a new group of drawings  Firespitters. The films unfold across several important sites in Black spiritual and cultural history, bringing together writings by women from different eras, including Shaker visionary Rebecca Cox Jackson, abolitionist Sojourner Truth, the 1970s Black feminist organization Combahee River Collective, and experimental-jazz composer and spiritual leader Alice Coltrane, whose music also forms the soundtrack for both films.