MING SMITH

Both spontaneous and carefully composed, Smith’s in-action photographs record crowded scenes of pleasure-seekers on Coney Island and frenzied portraits of jazz musicians mid-performance. Deliberately blurring the images, or shooting through mist and fog, Smith imbues her compositions with an ethereal and otherworldly feel.

Smith has also experimented with radical artistic interventions into her photographs, developing techniques pioneered by the early Surrealists. A double exposed photograph shows James Baldwin’s face superimposed several times over a cloudy New York sky. A lively image of Grace Jones clubbing at New York’s Studio 54 is covered with swirls of pink paint applied with visible finger marks. In several photographs, Smith over-paints the image until it is almost completely abstracted.

Portraiture is a recurring genre in Smith’s works, with subjects ranging from notable black cultural figures like Nina Simone and Tina Turner to those living on the margins of society, such as Harlem street children. She has also produced captivating solo and group portraits in Ivory Coast, Ethiopia and Senegal. Smith has often been her own subject too, for example in a series of striking photographic self-portraits taken in the mirror in her apartment. Reflecting on her career, the artist has said: “It was just me and my camera. I worked to capture black culture, the richness, the love.”

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Ming Smith grew up in Columbus, OH, and moved to New York in the early 1970s. There she worked with a wide network of fellow artists, musicians and dancers. She was the first, and for many years the only, woman member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of African American photographers based in New York. The group formed with the aim of challenging negative representations of black communities and to develop photography as an artistic practice. In 1975 she became the first African American woman photographer to have work acquired by The Museum of Modern Art, NY. Throughout her career she has travelled extensively, capturing life in America, Africa, Europe and East Asia.

Smith was recently the subject of three simultaneous solo exhibitions across Columbus, OH: Jazz Requiem - Notations in Blue, Gund Gallery at Kenyon College; Transcendence, Columbus Museum of Art; and Wind Chime, Wexner Museum of Art (2024-25). In 2023 Smith was honoured with the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York, and the Lucie Awards 2023 Achievement in Portraiture. She was also recently the subject of two major solo exhibitions: Projects: Ming Smith, curated by Thelma Golden, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), NY (2023) and Ming Smith: Feeling the Future, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX (2023), travelling to the International African American Museum, Charleston, SC in 2024. Recent exhibitions include Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2023-4); Black American Portraits, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), CA; touring to Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA and Mechanical Hall, Newark, DE (2021-23); The Power of Portraiture: Recent Acquisitions, The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC (2023); BLACK VENUS, curated by Aindrea Emelife, Fotografiska New York (2022); Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2020); touring to The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2020-21); The J. Paul Getty Museum, LA (2022); Cincinnati Art Museum (2020-22); _We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965-85, _Brooklyn Museum, NY (2017); Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbably, Yet Extraordinary Renditions (Featuring Ming Smith, Frida Orupabo, and Missylanyus), Serpentine Galleries, London (2017); and Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), NY (2010).

In December 2022, a new book, Ming Smith: Invisible Man, written by Oluremi C. Onabanjo was published as part of MoMA’s One on One series. Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph, the first comprehensive publication dedicated to Smith, was published in 2020, featuring essays and interviews by Arthur Jafa, Greg Tate, Namwali Serpell, and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Smith’s work is held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, NY; Detroit Institute of Arts, MICH; J. Paul Getty Museum, LA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PE; National Gallery of Art, Washington; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NY; Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum, Washington; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, Washington; The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), NY; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.

Text courtesy Pippy Houldsworth Gallery.