Cauleen Smith’s experimental films, textiles, sculpted objects and installations explore Black creativity, liberatory potentialities of spirituality and technology, and “everyday possibilities of the imagination”. With The Wanda Coleman Songbook, Smith offers a multi-sensory meditation on Los Angeles. The poet Wanda Coleman (1946-2013) is at once subject and source, Smith’s key to finding form and language to address the most enigmatic city in the United States.
The four-channel video surrounds visitors with lowrider cars, flower stalls, liquor stores, the Hollywood Hills, the oil wells of Baldwin Hills, and shots of Coleman’s books. The space evokes a recording studio, with sofas and rugs. Stencil projections distill history in silhouette: ravens on powerlines, an Olmec head symbol- ising the unity of the city’s Indigenous, Latinx and Black communities. The earthen scent of Griffith Park wafts through the installation.
Coleman, raised in the working-class Watts community, keenly sensed and put words to the city’s beauty and violent contradictions. In turn, Smith commissioned seven tracks from Black composers who bring their own tonal and emotional interpolations to Coleman’s lines. For Smith the work is an “envelope” that conveys the intimacy of living in LA between myth and reality – as Kelsey Lu sings, quoting Coleman, “the place where all the lives / are planted in my eyes”.
—Robin D.G. Kelley
