In a commissioned installation for the Harnett Museum, Cauleen Smith asks what could reconstruction mean 147 years after its promises were buried? Using video and video cameras, found objects, specimens from the Lora Robins Gallery collection, and other props, Smith will create a unique “space station”—a tabletop video device and projection apparatus—to create an immersive environment inspired by the removal of Confederate monuments on Richmond’s Monument Avenue. This immersive environment probes new futures and way of memorializing the past. When all of the parts of the installation are taken together, they collectively reflect on the ghosts of the Confederacy that continue to ruthlessly haunt contemporary society and the ways in which the country’s wealth rests on the substrate of obscene violence of the American South. Smith proposes to shift the focus of reconstruction from a Confederate project to an African American one, emphasizing instead the ways in which African Americans have spent more than 150 years trying to reform the America politic. Within this lens, the exhibition provocatively reconsiders the stake, ways, and means of reconstruction right now.

The title of the installation is borrowed from W.E.B. DuBois’s 1940 essay in which he describes the psycho-political condition of African Americans and demands a refusal of internalized racist logics. Wrestling with his proposals, the installation creates a space of discomfort and generates a discursive curiosity in the spectator, inviting them to examine their relationship to the signs and signifiers presented. The installation evokes questions, such as: what might “a more perfect union” look like? What would we make if we spent our time building futures rather than redeeming the failed promises of the past? Could a proposal to demolish, which is what symbolically happened with the removal of Confederate Monuments on Monument Avenue, make way for a New Way? Or does it simply leave a void and obscure what once was and perhaps still is?

Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn is organized by the University of Richmond Museums in collaboration with the Department of Art & Art History, University of Richmond, as part of the annual Tucker Boatwright Festival. 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).