major retrospective of Smith's work; and after the 2017 Brooklyn Museum
exhibition "We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85," "I had
women telling me they cried when they saw my pictures," Smith says. This fall,
as the Tate Modern-curated exhibition "Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black
Power" lands at the Brooklyn Museum, her pictures again gain a prominent
place, perhaps pointing curators to bodies of work still largely unseen.
We are sitting in Smith's apartment, with its twin views: a window onto
central Harlem where she now lives, and the living room, filled with evidence
of the last 40 years, piles of large framed prints, and massive, taped-up ones.
The floors are heaped with more prints, framed and unframed, and boxes of
slides. Smith, a striking beauty in her 60s, darts around the room barefoot
among them, with dancer-like elegance. Visible here are years spent in music
and traveling the world, as during her marriage to jazz saxophonist David Murray
(whose portrait is among the MoMA holdings), as well as distinct and deeply
Ming Smith, known for the ethereal quality of
her photographs created through complex
processes, has depicted important figures of
black culture since the '70s.
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