Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn, Opening Reception

Celebrate the opening of the exhibition Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn.

About the exhibition: In her 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.

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.