Ming Smith: Feeling the Future

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) is excited to present the exhibition, Ming Smith: Feeling the Future, exploring artist Ming Smith’s unparalleled and under-recognized career. Feeling the Future is Smith’s first solo exhibition at a major institution to survey her work from the early 1970s through the present. The exhibition highlights Smith’s improvisational and experimental approach to photography, which is grounded in portraiture, and amplifies the heartbeat of Black life in the United States.

Drawn from the full complexity of Smith’s oeuvre, Feeling the Future places works from the artist’s five-decades of creation in conversation with one another, and the cultural movements she witnessed and participated in. Exploring themes such as Afrofuturism, Black cultural expression, representation, and social examination, the exhibition offers a glimpse into unperceived moments of life as captured by one of the most profoundly gifted artists of her generation.

Smith’s reflexive approach to photography has been described as elusive, a poetic blurring, which can be seen in the ways she imbues her images with a sense of vibrancy and expression. She describes her practice as a “search for the cosmic by following the light.” For example, long exposures trace light and movement within the frame, causing the picture to become abstracted. And by superimposing images, whether in color or black-and-white, she collapses time, distance, and perspective, referencing existence beyond a single dimension. Exhibition curator James E. Bartlett recognizes these formal and conceptual characteristics as tapping into “root emotions” or individual expressions that connect us to each other.

The exhibition showcases Smith’s expansive use of lens-based media and features her street photography, figurative imagery, portraiture, and abstractions, plus new commissions in experimental film, sound, and installation in collaboration with her son, Mingus Murray.

Feeling the Future includes Smith’s most iconic photographs as well as her more recent work. Smith’s early images vibrate with the energy of her subjects—in carefully composed images, often developed or processed using techniques such as frame masking, hand-tinting, and superimposition, she blurs boundaries between the ethereal, tangible, and routine. Smith’s work uniquely embraces her subjects aesthetically and intellectually, through a style that is technically experimental and pointedly focused.

Ming Smith: Feeling the Future is organized by Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and curated by James E. Bartlett. The exhibition was conceived by Janice Bond.