Learn more about the exhibition Cauleen Smith: We Already Have What We Need with artist Cauleen Smith, MASS MoCA’s Senior Curator, Susan Cross, and CAMH Curator Rebecca Matalon. The group will discuss Smith’s work including the film, video, sculpture, textiles, installation, and drawing included in the exhibition. Learn more about Smith’s process and how the exhibition emphasizes acts of caring as antidotes to the injustices and inequities that shape our past and present.
There will be seating provided for this program. Please contact fcleveland@camh.org if you have additional accessibility questions or requests.
Cauleen Smith: We Already Have What We Need is organized by MASS MoCA and Susan Cross, Senior Curator. The exhibition’s presentation at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is organized by Rebecca Matalon, Curator.
Principal exhibition support was provided by Anne and Greg Avis and the Coby Foundation. Lead support was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts with contributing support from LEE Filters and Susan J. Weiler. Programming at MASS MoCA is made possible in part by the Barr Foundation, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, and Massachusetts Cultural Council.
CAMH’s presentation is funded in part by the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance.
About Cauleen Smith
Cauleen Smith received 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. Her films, objects, and installations have been featured in group exhibitions at the Studio Museum of Harlem, New York, New York; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California; the New Museum, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois. She has had solo shows for her films and installations at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2020); The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2020); The Frye Museum, Seattle, Washington (2019); Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, Richmond, Virginia (2019) Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2018); Art Institute of Chicago (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2012); and The Kitchen, New York (2011), among others.
Smith is the recipient of multiple awards and fellowships including the prestigious inaugural Ellsworth Kelly Award of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. She has received a Creative Capital grant, a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artist-In-Residence; Black Metropolis Research Consortium Research Fellowship; and the Director’s Grant at the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts in Santa Barbara, California. Smith was previously included in two group exhibitions at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston—Nexus Texas (2007), which featured new works by artists living and working in the state and was on view during Smith’s time living and teaching in Austin, and 2008’s Cinema Remixed & Reloaded: Black Women Artists and The Moving Image since 1970. She currently teaches in the School of Art at CalArts in Santa Clarita, California.
About Susan Cross
Susan Cross is Senior Curator at MASS MoCA where she organized the original presentation of Cauleen Smith: We Already Have What We Need. She has also curated solo exhibitions and major commissions by Alex Da Corte, Liz Deschenes, Marcos Ramirez ERRE, Spencer Finch, Liz Glynn, Katharina Grosse, Allison Janae Hamilton, Steffani Jemison, Richard Nonas, Gamaliel Rodriguez, and many more. Group exhibitions include The Workers, a look at representations of contemporary labor, Invisible Cities, an investigation of urban imaginings inspired by Italo Calvino’s beloved book The Dying of the Light, a love letter to analog film, and The Lure of the Dark, an homage to the contemporary nocturne. Currently she is working on Ceramics in the Expanded Field, a show featuring eight artists integrating clay with mediums ranging from video to performance. Prior to her tenure at MASS MoCA, Cross was a curator at the Guggenheim Museum.