[music]

Alison: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC Studios in SoHo. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or On Demand, I'm grateful you're here. On today's show, the Grammys are this weekend, so we'll hear from two of the nominees, Maren Morris and Willie Nelson, not together. We'll talk to lawyer turned TV writer, and now novelist, Kashana Cauley, about her new book, The Survivalists, and we'll speak with Manhattan Vintage fair owner, Amy Abrams. That is the plan, so let's get this started with photographer Ming Smith.

[music]

Alison: There's a new collaborative exhibition between the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum titled Projects: Ming Smith. It opens tomorrow at MoMA on 53rd, and we are getting a preview today from Ming Smith herself, as well as with the Director of the Studio Museum, Thelma Golden, and MoMA Associate Curator, Oluremi Onabanjo. Based in New York since the 70s, Ming Smith's career spans more than five decades with work informed and inspired by her life in the city and her creative peers. She was part of the legendary Kamoinge Art Collective in Harlem. She's also moved by music so much so that the exhibition titled Projects: Ming Smith has an accompanying Spotify playlist featuring Abby Lincoln, Donny Hathaway, Allyson, John Coltrane, among others.

Smith documents moments of daily life, captures moods of moments, and in some cases creates surreal images. As she describes it in the show, "Whatever I'm shooting, whether it's a portrait of a place, my intention is to capture the feeling I have about that exchange and that energy." Projects: Ming Smith opens February 4th and is on view until May 29th at MoMA. With me now in studio is Ming Smith. Nice to meet you.

Ming: Hey, hey, hey. [laughter]

Alison: Also, joining me in studio is MoMA Associate Curator of Photography Remi Onabanjo. Remi, hi.

Oluremi: Hi. It's wonderful to be here.

Alison: Also Thelma Golden, Director of the Studio Museum, welcome back to the show at Thelma.

Thelma: Thank you, Alison.

Alison: All right. This is a little bit of an essay question Ming, but it's what I really wanted to know after seeing the show, what did you want this show to be?

Ming: Well, Space is the Place, Sun Ra and the Studio Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. It's really, space is the place. Now, today it's surreal and it's the space. It's like the space has transformed. It shows my work, but it's very transformational in images, and space is the place.

Alison: Yes, Remi, that space is amazing. I know exactly what you mean. I want to create a visual for people. It's a large white square, but it's got so much height to it.

Oluremi: Absolutely.

Alison: When you were thinking about putting this show together, and to Ming's point about space being the place, how did you think about space and Ming's work?

Oluremi: Absolutely. It's been such a pleasure to work with Thelma and Ming on this exhibition, and we cannot wait to invite everyone down to the first-floor galleries at MoMA. This is a double-height gallery, as you've mentioned, Alison. We've got serious space to engage with. The idea with the exhibition was really to show how Ming looks, how she sees as a photographer, and give people these moments of transcendence. While we do have a string of different groupings, thematically-oriented, delving into different aspects of her practice, what we thought was we have this fantastic north wall that spans the height of two floors that you can see from our second-floor walkway. Really we thought, "Okay, how do we bring people in, get a sense of the immediacy, the glamor, the glitz, the excitement in her life." We made these fantastic, really majestic-sized panels mounted on die bond that really scale the entirety of that wall, and we feel like it's something that gives you a sense of the buoyancy and the lightness of her images.

Alison: Thelma, what was unique about this collaboration?

Thelma: What's unique about this collaboration is that it really grew organically out of the relationship between the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Museum of Modern Art. The partnership, which results in this exhibition, and the three that came before it, have really allowed us to continue to present and program while the Studio Museum is closed as we build our new building. In particular, this project is unique because Ming had relationships, significant historic relationships with both of our institutions. In many ways, the exhibition at this moment is a continuation of the way in which Ming has been in the center of the ways in which both of our institutions in collecting and presenting. She's had a relationship with both. To be able to do this now, I think we all have been grateful for the collaboration and the partnership.

Alison: Ming, how did you decide which photos? How did you all decide, but I'll start with you, which photos to include? If you could come a little closer to the microphone. There you go.

Ming: Well, both Thelma and her crew and Oluremi, we went through three visits, two storage spaces, and my home, and we went through every photograph. They basically curated the exhibition. I felt vulnerable--

Alison: Sure.

Ming: --because someone else was choosing my images. They were new images, and I was so happy that I relinquished my power to them, and had faith in them because they were brilliant, brilliant. I learned more about my work and myself and even the importance in a time span that I lived in because a lot of it is very personal. They had context and there was a vision and a thought, thoughts of our culture. There was joy and all the things that I aspired to that I don't really talk about, but I try to capture in my photographs.

Alison: Sure.

Ming: They got it and they put it together beautifully. It's a beautiful, beautiful exhibition. There was so much love from the people that came. When they saw the images, I felt like I was in a womb. The room was like a womb of the museum. Like the Studio Museum inside this MoMA and this room within that context of all the other work, it was really heartfelt and everyone expressed that to me.

Oluremi: I also feel that the whole process that you mentioned about this warmth that we feel in this space was really-- I felt on my side as well as Thelma and our collaborators in making this exhibition with every visit over those three spaces of your archive. Often someone has mentioned that we worked a little bit like a curatorial conveyor belt. I felt like we were all very connected. Everyone was looking at every print really taking time for you as a rediscovery in some ways. For us, it was an encounter for the first time. Sometimes looking at variants of pictures you'd made, seeing your artistry and your virtuosity as a printer, as well as a photographer. How those things drew from one sided to the other of the practice was really an honor. To be able to share that is really such a gift.

Alison: It's so interesting because scale is such a big part of the show. Thelma, when you go in there are smaller prints, but then there's an entire wall that is wrapped. It's a 1980 photo of Hartley Roy Bibbs called Circular Breathing. What's interesting to you about seeing a photo presented like that?

Thelma: What's interesting about the presentation is that it really speaks to the way in which Ming has been an innovator and she has thought about her lens-based practice always in innovative ways and can see it in a fresh way. I think the gift of the collaboration, I've been a curator for decades, and the opportunity to be able to work with an artist to look at all of their work with them. To be able to hear directly from them about what they were thinking at that moment, but also how they might think about those images in the present. That's what was able to happen with Ming in the collaboration between Remi and I, but also with our teams. It's a gift that I know because I've had the privilege of being a curator for some time, but I know it has changed.

This is the incredible young curatorial team as they have decades to work. I think also what was interesting about the scale was we also were trying to create an experience, right? Within Ming's work, you feel the experiential. We wanted the exhibition, the project, and the project space to do that. In many ways, the architecture of that space allows it. It allowed us to play, it allowed us to think about how can this room present Ming's work in ways that honor its depth and its breadth, but also bring to it, a sense of looking at it in a different and a new way.

Alison: I observed something interesting yesterday when I saw there's the double-- What do you call it? The double--

Ming: Yes, double-height wall.

Alison: The double-height wall. There was a young woman looking at it and she just kept looking up and down. I had gone over to get the guide about what the photos were, and she's like, "Oh, there's a guide?" She was just taking it in for what it was. She didn't necessarily need to know what each photo was, which I thought was really, really interesting. She just wanted to absorb it.

Ming: [unintelligible 00:10:32]

Remi: To think about the images being a language in and of themselves. I think that's something really beautiful about Ming's pictures. You see them for their formal capacity like they're unbelievable representations of light and darkness, shadow. Really, as photographs, they are impeccable. Then there's the second layer which is who are these people. These are love letters to musicians, to dancers. You've got Sun Ra in there, as Ming [unintelligible 00:11:02] You also have Randy Weston, James Van Der Zee as multiple exposures in the sky. I feel like the more time you spend in front of those images, the more you learn and the more you feel as well.

Alison: We are discussing Projects: Ming Smith which opens at MoMA on February 4th, it's tomorrow. My guests are Ming Smith, as well as Thelma Golden, Director of the Studio Museum, and Remi Onabanjo. I hope I've been saying that right.

Remi: Perfect.

Alison: Okay. As a curator of photography at MoMA. Let's talk about the music. Ming, at the beginning of the exhibition, there's a quote that reads, "These pieces are like the blues," how so when you think about the blues, when you think about music in your work, what's the relationship?

Ming: The feeling, and the spirituality, and the improvising, the gift to improvise, that is the blues to me. A lot of the photos came out of a painful experience, or just everyday life, and navigating every day, the day-to-day living, and its challenges. These photos come from a feeling within me, my own personal experience, and trying to make everyday experiences art to celebrate the joy or the life or the genius of our culture and the music or the dancers like Alvin Ailey, or Pharoah Sanders, this time period. They created all this beautiful work during the Black Arts Movement, or the Black Panthers, and all of that turmoil and creating something beautiful that everyone relates to all over the world.

Alison: Tell me about the playlist, the Spotify playlist, it's fun.

Remi: Absolutely. It's fabulous. I think it was something where in the process of making this exhibition, Ming repeatedly started talking about her images in the way that she just did. Thinking about them in relation to music, movement. I think a lot of what we're arguing for on the show is that to look at pictures is not just to see them as documents, but to see them as sites of expression. We feel that Ming is the best guardian to see through pictures and how they witnessed things that allow us music, allow us sound, and texture.

As a guide, we thought okay, why not make a playlist because Ming said, "Okay, I'm going to make you a playlist," and we were all listening to it throughout making the exhibition from her greats. We thought why not extend that to our visitors? The two fantastic curatorial assistants who worked with us on this exhibition, Habiba Hopson from the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Kaitlin Booher in the Department of photography with me here at MoMA. They co-authored a beautiful piece on MoMa magazine where they did an introduction, an interview with Ming giving context to those pictures. When anyone enters the space, they can scan a QR code, hear a little bit of that music as they're seeing the pictures, but also read Ming's words to give context to why those pictures are so connected to those sounds.

Alison: We're discussing Projects: Ming Smith. It opens tomorrow at MoMA. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[music]

This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest this hour are photographer Ming Smith, Thelma Golden, Director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Remi Onabanjo, Associate Curator of photography at MoMA. We are having a great conversation about Projects: Ming Smith which opens at MoMA tomorrow. Ming, I'm going to ask Thelma to talk about you like you're not here for a second. Tell us about the importance of Ming Smith in photography.

Thelma: Ming is central to how we think about photography in the late 20th century and as we move into the 21st. She's a pioneer as a photographer and existed within the medium as a practitioner of incredible rigor and also as an innovator. A lot of what this exhibition and our selection of photographs was meant to do was to allow an understanding of that. That Ming is operating with this incredible poetic fluidity in image making, and doing so in a medium where she is not simply mastering the medium, she is bending it and shaping it to her will as if with magic. You see that in the lights and the darks and the compositional work.

Also, Ming is an important cultural documentarian, and the playlist is one way you see that. These works are cited in time and place and they speak so deeply to the way in which we can understand the power of Black culture through these works, through the works that document moments, but also through the way in which Ming has walked through the world, seeing the world and capturing it through her experience.

Alison: Ming, do you remember one of the first times you ever picked up a camera?

Ming: I do. I photographed my first day in kindergarten. I asked to borrow my mother's brownie. I took a photograph of three of my classmates that were Black in a predominantly white school. I took their portraits [unintelligible 00:17:25] all of them. Yes, kindergarten.

Alison: I love that way your brain was thinking then, you're wired at five to take a picture [unintelligible 00:17:36].

Ming: This is the connection without really understanding completely, everything about race or anything. It was innocent but yet it was heartfelt.

Alison: I was going to say you're sophisticated actually when you think about it. I want to talk about some of the ways that you do innovate in your photography, the use of, and I'm going to pretend like I know what I'm talking about here, slowing down your shutter speed to get the blurred images. When did you arrive at this practice? When do you know you're going to use it?

Ming: I look at the light. It's actually not slowing down my shutter speed.

Alison: Please tell me. Correct me.

Ming: It's like it's open. That's where circular breathing came out of because when it's slowly lit, you have to hold the cameras still and you have to hold your breath. To capture the light, you don't want to move and you want to try to have it in focus as much as possible. That's how that came up. A jazz photographer that hung around jazz, I was in Paris and I was photographing holding the camera very still and he said, "You know your circular breathing." I was like, "What?" I got it instantly because I knew that was a term the jazz musicians used when they improvise, especially when they solo. That correlation came out of circular breathing. The light is really what you look at and your eyes and the instrument is really trying to capture that image. It's really about the light and how it plays out in whatever you see in the frame.

Alison: Remi, what are the perhaps more political meanings behind the blur, something that you can, another layer aside from it being gorgeous and interesting, but there seems to be something else going on as well.

Remi: Absolutely. I think it's really about seeing the picture is beyond this moment of capture. I think especially when we're looking at Ming's lifelong commitment, as she's mentioned from kindergarten to now, to really witnessing Black folks in life, in everyday life, in joy, in hardships, in solitude, and together, it's to think about what exceeds the specific moment of capture and thinking about fugitivity and all of its possibilities.

When we're thinking about communities that have been marginalized in particular narratives, we have somebody who has committed her entire life in her photographic practice to witnessing them. I feel that this is the political significance of her pictures. I think also when we see how she's really paid homage to those greats who have also done so. We have two series in the exhibition, one, Invisible Man, and the other August Moon for August Wilson. We see Ming not only paying homage to those spaces and places that have been crucial for Black life, but also to Ralph Ellison and August Wilson, two key figures in this country for both literature and drama. I feel there's so many levels of connectivity that you can look at when you see her pictures.

Alison: I love the two. I think there are two double exposures. One with Van Der Zee and one with James Baldwin hovering in the heavens [chuckles] above us. What was the inspiration for these two, for the hovering heavens photos? [chuckles]

Ming: When I was working on my first self-published book, which came out of many of my friends dying during the AIDS. I was thinking of mortality and their legacy, and I decided to do a book. I compiled some images and two of them, Van Der Zee and Baldwin, they were average to me images. They were images of them, but the way I felt about them and how Harlem and the Blacks did like they were geniuses, I wanted to do something that would stand out, that would give them the importance and the love that people had for them like James Van Der Zee, how he inspired generations and just seeing those photographs, and then Baldwin. I met Baldwin. Both very generous spirits, really beautiful human beings. They were icons then in my heart. I wanted to make them magnificent. I had them in the sky of Harlem. The original photograph was just the skyline of Harlem. With me, my printer at the time, and we-- That was all experimental.

Alison: Nice.

Ming: That's how that came about. It was always the humanity and the love of the culture.

Alison: Thelma, I saw you nodding during this. Did you want to add something about those two images?

Thelma: Well, I think they're an incredible example of the way in which Ming is thinking so deeply in the making of the images, but also how that is so resonant in our experience of them because we feel the reference that comes through. We also feel the tangible quality that comes out of those images where Ming is thinking about what they should be as objects after, not just as images, but what they should be in the world.

Alison: Ming, when you're photographing daily life, is there anything that you're particularly looking for, or do the moments just appear to you?

Ming: That's tricky. My practice is spiritually based. When I go on the street, whatever the spirit, God, the light, whatever presents, I try to capture that but I feel that I'm a vessel for God's work. From the beginning, I didn't ever say that I was a photographer. I didn't know, but I knew I had to make images. When I go to Harlem, it's just a feeling or some part of the culture, the neighborhood, the community that I want to show the world that I feel. The feeling like Billie Holiday, her music, and how it speaks to me. I wanted my photograph to, Alice Coltrane, that feeling. I wanted to do that in photography.

Alison: Remi, what questions would you like people to be having having coffee after the show, or a glass of wine and talking about the show? What questions would you like people to consider?

Remi: That's such a great question. I think it would be about, what are the things that we can learn from artists. Also, how is it that artists show us the multiplicities of life? I think Ming is so deft at showing us the possibility of what a picture can hold, but also, as you can tell, Ming is an unbelievable musical ear. She's a phenomenal dancer. She's a mother. I think it's to think about artists in the way they take from the world and contribute back. I feel like, yes, this is a photography exhibition, but it's also so much more. It's just the beginning in many ways.

Alison: Thelma, same question for you.

Thelma: Remi has said it so beautifully. I also want them to be able to ask the question of themselves, to use the exhibition as a way to understand how we all experience the world. Ming is showing us how to do it with so much intention, so much inspiration, so much spirit, and so much soul. How can we bring that into the way we see the world? I want our viewers to experience and have that experience impact the way they walk through the world when they leave the project gallery at MoMA

Alison: Projects: Ming Smith opens tomorrow at the Museum of Modern Art on 53rd Street. My guests have been Ming Smith, photographer, Thelma Golden, Director of the Studio Museum, and Remi Onabanjo, the Associate Curator of Photography at MoMA. Thank you for coming in on this cold day. It was so nice to be with you in person.

Ming: Thanks for having us

Thelma: Thank you.

Alison: Let's go out on some music from that fantastic playlist. I picked Abbey Lincoln. Let's go.

[music]

Bird alone flying high

Flying through a clouded sky

Sending mournful soulful sounds

Soaring over troubled grounds

Bird alone with no mate

Turning corners tempting fate

Flying circles in the air

Are you on your way somewhere

Gliding soaring on the wind

You're a sight of glory

Flying way up there so high

Wonder what's your story

Bird alone flying low

[00:29:21] [END OF AUDIO]

 

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