In installation, video and drawing, Cauleen Smith exuberantly interrogates everyday images, objects, and histories to imagine other possible futures. Combining strategies from activism, science fiction, and experimental cinema, Smith’s artworks function as speculative devices that generate curiosity as a way of thinking beyond the status quo. In this exhibition, Smith directs her focus on reimagining the unfulfilled promise of reconstruction. 

Atop a central “space station,” Smith draws together disparate objects with moving images. Replicas of the plinths that once stood on Monument Avenue are juxtaposed with rocks and crystals, construction equipment, and icons evoking the prizewinning cyclist Marshall Walter “Major” Taylor, and Mary Bowser, a freed slave who spied for the Union Army in the Confederate White House. Images [of _______] flood across the tabletop monitors, recontextualizing the objects beyond the space of the gallery and remaking their meaning in the history of the United States. The immersive experience emphasizes the indispensable contributions of African Americans to the reformation of American culture and politics and shifts the focus of reconstruction from a Confederate project to an African American one. 

Across the gallery, Smith’s Bronze Icebergs drawings cannibalize Executive Order 13934 drafted in July 2020 in response to calls to remove Confederate monuments in the wake of the George Floyd Protests. Smith obscures the text of the order, overwriting it with the names of revolutionary Black women—Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Angela Davis—to imagine new futures and ways of memorializing the past. 

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from W.E.B. DuBois’s 1940 autobiography, Dusk of Dawn in which he grapples with race, the psycho-political condition of African Americans and demands a refusal of internalized racist logics. Positing Richmond as a nexus of the American psyche, this exhibition reflects on the ghosts of the Confederacy that continue to ruthlessly haunt contemporary society to instead question what a more perfect union might look like. 

Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn is organized by the University of Richmond Museums in collaboration with the Department of Art & Art History as part of the 2025-26 Tucker Boatwright Festival of Literature and the Arts. Through a series of programs, lectures and exhibitions, this year’s theme of “Reconstruction” is meant to highlight the variety of ongoing and historical cultural revolutions that we study, experience, and manifest (in art). The exhibition is curated by Orianna Cacchione, Deputy Director and Curator of Exhibitions.

About the Artist
Cauleen Smith (born Riverside, California, 1967) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. Operating in multiple materials and arenas, Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film. Drawing from structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction, she makes things that deploy the tactics of these disciplines while offering a phenomenological experience for spectators and participants. Her work has been showcased at major museums around the world, including the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University; MASS MoCA; the Art Institute of Chicago; Institute for Contemporary Art Pennsylvania; the Museum of Contemporary, Chicago; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Smith is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including the 2022 Heinz Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2020 Wein Artist Prize from the Studio Museum in Harlem, the inaugural Ellsworth Kelly Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Art in 2016, the 2016 Herb Alpert Award for Film/Video, Rockefeller Media Arts Award, Creative Capital Film /Video, Chicago 3Arts Grant, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Artadia, a  Rauschenberg Residency in 2015 and recently in 2019, Smith was an artist in residence at Artpace.

Tucker Boatwright Festival
Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn is produced in conjunction with the Tucker Boatwright Festival, hosted annually at the University of Richmond on a rotating cycle between different departments. The Department of Art & Art History will present the 2025-26 festival organized around the theme of “Reconstruction.” Through a series of programs and lectures, this theme is meant to highlight the variety of ongoing and historical cultural revolutions that we study, experience, and manifest (in art).