Ming Smith, Jazz Requiem—Notations in Blue
February 6 through June 7, 2026
Jazz Requiem—Notations in Blue is an invitation to explore Ming Smith’s (United States, born 1947) artistic practice in relation to the complex notions of place and identity that shaped the early stages of her career during the 1970s and 80s.
Smith came of age as an artist during a time when many Black artists across disciplines found Europe more receptive to their work, providing them with greater opportunities and the freedom to hone their craft. The exhibition reflects on how Smith’s formative experiences as an artist traveling in Europe shaped her practice and continues to influence her work.
The artworks selected for this exhibition, many printed for the first time, aim to capture the intricacies of the Black experience, both subtle and stark, within everyday life and beyond socially expected localities. Her photographs are known for their elusive yet poignant depictions conveying the soon vanishing qualities of a moment in movement. Throughout her career, the artist has embodied a central tenet of the Black Arts Movement: the idea of “owning the images that we saw of ourselves.” Even in these early moments of her artistic development, Smith expanded photography beyond the so-called realism previously attributed to photographs of Black people– to document, catalog, or analyze them. Her work confronts notions of the gaze inherent to photography, both internalizing and subverting the medium’s objectifying tendencies.
Jazz Requiem—Notations in Blue underscores the profound influence of intuitive expression found in dance and music, particularly jazz, as a throughline in Smith’s work. It also reveals how Smith draws from earlier figures like Brassaï and Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose evocative and saturnine pictures she encountered firsthand while in Paris in the 1970s. Smith’s legacy is defined by her pioneering role in breaking barriers for Black women in photography, her innovative artistic techniques, and her commitment to documenting the richness of Black life. Her signature use of blur and abstraction is more than an aesthetic choice. It is a response to the ways Black Americans are rendered simultaneously invisible and hyper visible by society.
Ming Smith (United States, born 1950), Self-Portrait, 1989, archival pigment print, 36 × 24 inches. Courtesy of Ming Smith Studios and The Gund at Kenyon College.
ABOUT MING SMITH
Ming Smith (born 1947) is a groundbreaking American photographer born in Detroit and raised in Columbus, Ohio. After earning a degree in microbiology from Howard University, she moved to New York City, supporting herself as a model while developing a unique visual language photographing the streets, clubs, and “secret spaces” of the city. In Anthony Barboza’s studio, she met fellow photographers Louis Draper and Joe Crawford, often engaging with them on the finer points of photography as an art form. In 1972, Draper invited her to join the Kamoinge Workshop, a creative collective of photographers dedicated to the positive depiction of quotidian Black life. She was the collective’s first female member. Later in 1979 she would be the first Black woman artist to have her photographs acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Voraciously experimental, she places her camera in dialogue with her environment to produce beautiful and elegiac pictures whose surfaces she often reworks through drawing. Smith’s photographs pulse with the same energy and spontaneity that define jazz, reflecting her deep admiration for the music and its leading figures, whom she photographed with intimacy and respect. She pursues image-making to remember, share, and deeply feel the world around her.
Credit Lines:
Ming Smith, Jazz Requiem—Notations in Blue is organized by The Gund at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio. The Gund programs and exhibitions are made possible, in part, by The Gund Board of Directors and the Ohio Arts Council.
Generous support provided by Art Bridges
