ATLANTA, GA.- Spelman College Museum of Fine Art presents Ming Smith: Feeling the Future. The first solo exhibition of photographer Ming Smith in Atlanta and at an HBCU, this exhibition is a selection of the artist’s work from the 1970s to the present. Feeling the Future presents photographs that are in conversation with each other across time and space. 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. Drawn from the full complexity of Smith’s oeuvre, Feeling the Future places works from the artist’s five decades of creation 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.

Ming Smith: Feeling the Future is the first major career-spanning museum show for Harlem-based artist Ming Smith, a pioneer of image-making. Smith, who is known for her improvisational and experimental approach to photography, uses light, shadow, and movement to create dynamic portraits of the Black experience and multidimensional expressions of everyday life.

Harlem-based, Detroit-born, Ming Smith attended the famous Howard University, in Washington, DC. Smith became a photographer when she was given a camera, and was the first female member to join Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of Black photographers in New York in the 1960s. Smith would go on to be the first Black woman photographer to be included in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Smith initially focused on black-and-white street photography, a format she describes as having the “capacity to catch a moment that would never ever return again, and do it justice.” She has often characterized her work as “celebrating the struggle, the survival and to find grace in it.” Many of Smith’s subjects are well-known Black cultural figures including Nina Simone, Grace Jones, and Alice Coltrane, who all lived in her Harlem neighborhood. Smith cites music, specifically jazz, as being a primary influence on her work. She also likens her work to the blues, saying, “in the art of photography, I’m dealing with light, I’m dealing with all these elements, getting that precise moment. Getting the feeling—to put it simply, these pieces are like the blues.”

As an artist, full recognition for Smith’s work only arrived recently in response to several high-profile exhibitions. She was included in The Museum of Modern Art’s 2010 landmark exhibition, Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography. She featured prominently in Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop, organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond) and presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, New York) in 2020. Smith was included in Soul of a Nation at Tate Modern in London, England (2017), which traveled to The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2020). Smith’s work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, New York), Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond), the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York, New York), and the National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington, D.C.).

Ming Smith: Feeling the Future is organized by Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and curated by James Bartlett. The exhibition was conceived by Janice Bond. The Spelman College Museum of Fine Art presentation is curated by Karen Comer Lowe.