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Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn


Sep 05
Thru
Dec 13
Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art

 

Combining strategies from activism, science fiction and experimental cinema, Cauleen Smith creates artworks that ask challenging questions of our social order and collective histories. In this exhibition, Smith directs her focus on reimagining the unfulfilled promise of Reconstruction after the Civil War. 
 
Throughout the exhibition, Smith references monuments through two different registers—empty plinths and executive orders—to critically reconsider how we, as a country, commemorate our history. In an immersive video installation, Smith creates moving landscapes and backdrops for the empty plinths and other objects that intertwine references to Richmond’s Monument Avenue, geology, and African American history. The related set of drawings imagine a new visual system for monuments, where ecological imagery replaces nationalistic imagery and fugitives are celebrated as national heroes. Taken together, these artworks shift the focus of Reconstruction from the rebuilding of the former Confederate states to the indispensable contributions African Americans made to the reformation of American culture and politics. 
 
The title of the exhibition is borrowed from W.E.B. DuBois’s 1940 autobiography, Dusk of Dawn in which he grapples with the construction of race and the psycho-political condition of African Americans, ultimately demanding 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 haunt contemporary society and asks 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.

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    Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn at the Harnett Museum of Art at the University of Richmond Museums, September 5 - December 13, 2025
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    Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn at the Harnett Museum of Art at the University of Richmond Museums, September 5 - December 13, 2025
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    Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn at the Harnett Museum of Art at the University of Richmond Museums, September 5 - December 13, 2025
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    Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn at the Harnett Museum of Art at the University of Richmond Museums, September 5 - December 13, 2025
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    Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn at the Harnett Museum of Art at the University of Richmond Museums, September 5 - December 13, 2025
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    Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn at the Harnett Museum of Art at the University of Richmond Museums, September 5 - December 13, 2025
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    Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn at the Harnett Museum of Art at the University of Richmond Museums, September 5 - December 13, 2025
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    Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn at the Harnett Museum of Art at the University of Richmond Museums, September 5 - December 13, 2025
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    Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn at the Harnett Museum of Art at the University of Richmond Museums, September 5 - December 13, 2025
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    Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn at the Harnett Museum of Art at the University of Richmond Museums, September 5 - December 13, 2025
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    Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn at the Harnett Museum of Art at the University of Richmond Museums, September 5 - December 13, 2025
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    Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn at the Harnett Museum of Art at the University of Richmond Museums, September 5 - December 13, 2025