The Deep West Assembly

Astrup Fearnley Museet presents a solo exhibition of work by multidisciplinary American artist and filmmaker Cauleen Smith (born in Riverside, California, in 1967; raised in Sacramento, California; lives and works in Los Angeles). Smith is internationally known for visionary works that draw on experimental cinema from the 1960s and 1970s, science-fiction films and literature, and Afro-diasporic experience and thought. This solo exhibition offers a comprehensive view of Smith’s prolific output and premieres her latest film, The Deep West Assembly (2024), commissioned by Astrup Fearnley Museet.

In producing her films, videos, live-feed projections, and slide projections, Smith deploys original research and techniques of improvisation, arrangement, and live performance and narration, creating works that share affinities with theater and visual art. Aptly characterized by Romi N. Crawford as a “builder of Black cinema,” Smith merges film with music and poetry, longstanding forms for Black expression. Music, which features prominently throughout her work, serves as structure and scaffold, and her commitment to improvisation as a version of mastery accords with African and Afro-diasporic cultural production. Her methodologies rely on experimentation with collaborators, who help to shape and concretize her initial ideas into spaces for thought and creative resistance, without the intention of finding solutions or formulas to address the objects of her studies, such as racism in an anti-Black world.

Conceived for the show, Smith’s most recent film The Deep West Assembly delves into the concepts of geological time and Blackness as camouflaged in image, song, and word by Black and Brown creators (after thinkers such as Suzanne Césaire and Ryan C. Clarke). Incorporating images of geological formations like lava caves, calderas, and salt domes, as well as human-made landforms such as ancient Choctaw burial mounds, The Deep West Assembly paints a view of the American South as a horizontal “Deep West” (a term borrowed from poet Wanda Coleman). Smith situates this cultural Deep West in the Mississippi River Delta, exploring Black cultural practices as kin to Indigenous traditions. Actor Dionne Audain embodies multiple voices—guides—reading, among other texts, Smith’s recent Volcano Manifesto (F Books, 2022) for the camera. The exhibition also includes a new large-scale video installation in the museum’s double-height space, as well as the artist’s textile banners, drawings, and recent sculpture series of large hand-poured candles. Upstairs, Smith has embedded a reading room in the exhibition space, including a library comprising an international reading list made in collaboration with Oslo-based artist Ayesha Jordan.

After studying at San Francisco State University, where she encountered Black feminism, oppositional filmmaking, and structural film, Smith attended film school at the University of California, Los Angeles. In the intervening decades, she has concentrated on film- and exhibition-making, resulting in more than 30 films and videos shown internationally in installations in museums, galleries, and film festivals. Smith’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2021), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2021), the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2020–21), and the Art Institute of Chicago (2018), and in such public collections as the Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; and Tate Modern, London.

Curated by Rhea Anastas and Mia Locks.

Astrup Fearnley Museet and Cinemateket
As part of the exhibition program, Smith’s films will screen in a cinema for the first time in Norway in a partnership between Astrup Fearnley Museet and Cinemateket. One program presents Drylongso (1998), Smith’s first feature film. Smith released this genre-mixing story of the friendship, creativity, and world making of two Black women in Oakland California, to acclaim at the Sundance, South by Southwest, and Urbanworld Film festivals in 1999.

“A rediscovered treasure of 1990s DIY filmmaking, Cauleen Smith’s Drylongso embeds an incisive look at racial injustice within a lovingly handmade buddy movie/murder mystery/romance. Alarmed by the rate at which the young Black men around her are dying, brash Oakland, California, art student Pica (Toby Smith) attempts to preserve their existence in Polaroid snapshots, along the way forging a friendship with a woman in an abusive relationship (April Barnett) and experiencing love, heartbreak, and the everyday threat of violence. Capturing the vibrant community spirit of Oakland in the nineties, Smith crafts both a rare cinematic celebration of Black female creativity and a moving elegy for a generation of lost African American men.” —Criterion Collection

A second program presents a selection of two decades of Smith’s prodigious output concentrating on short filmmaking. Smith produced over 30 short films and videos since 1990.