Thursday, August 20, 2026 at 7:00 PM to Saturday, August 29, 2026 at 9:00 PM
Human Resources, Los Angeles
[Tickets](https://pools.events/t/nfg614tc/) Cauleen Smith makes films that treat imagination as a daily practice. Across three decades, she has returned again and again to speculative history and confabulation as ways of imagining Black ontologies—possible worlds that could exist alongside our ordinary reality. Moving between the everyday and the cosmic, her films draw on radical histories, experimental cinema, music, and science fiction to ask how images might not only reflect the world we inhabit, but help us imagine other ways of living within it. This four-night survey opens with *Drylongso* (1998), Smith’s historic debut feature about a young woman photographing every Black man in Oakland as a form of protection and witness. From there, the program moves into Smith’s essayistic and archival work of the 2000s and 2010s, including *The Fullness of Time* and *H-E-L-L-O*, before arriving at a run of shorts that reimagine collective liberation through sound, procession, and myth: *Space Is the Place (A March for Sun Ra)*, *Crow Requiem*, *Pilgrim*, *Three Songs About Liberation*, and *Sojourner*. The program closes with Smith’s most recent trio of works, *The Volcano Manifesto: My Caldera*,* Mines to Caves*,* *and* The Deep West Assembly*, which turn to geology and social landscapes as sites of conjectural history, extraction, and creation. This survey offers a rare chance to watch the full range of devices Smith has developed out of her structuralist and Third Cinema roots. No two films alike. Her work stays grounded throughout in a belief in utopian potentiality and a deep trust in the audience's own ability to dream. **Thursday, August 20th – 7 pm:** *Drylongso* (1998) Cauleen Smith’s *Drylongso* embeds an incisive look at racial injustice within a lovingly handmade buddy movie/murder mystery/romance. Alarmed by the rate at which the young Black men around her are dying, brash Oakland, California, art student Pica (Toby Smith) attempts to preserve their existence in Polaroid snapshots, along the way forging a friendship with a woman in an abusive relationship (April Barnett) and experiencing love, heartbreak, and the everyday threat of violence. Capturing the vibrant community spirit of Oakland in the nineties, Smith crafts both a rare cinematic celebration of Black female creativity and a moving elegy for a generation of lost African American men. **Friday, August 21st – 7 pm:** *The Fullness of Time* (2008) + *H-E-L-L-O* (2014) Both films were shot in New Orleans in the years after Hurricane Katrina, and together they form a kind of before-and-after portrait of a city relearning how to speak to itself. In *The Fullness of Time*, Smith repurposes the languages of physicists and astronomers to decode the rage, grief, elation, and hope of post-Katrina New Orleans, following a "sister from another planet" who wanders the ruined city trying to make sense of loss and time. Six years later, Smith returned to New Orleans for *H-E-L-L-O*, which observes a single musician's improvisations on the instantly recognizable five-note theme from *Close Encounters of the Third Kind*, music connecting the past and present, body and spirit, Earth and the cosmos. The two works trace a city, and an artist, moving from disorientation toward reconnection **Friday, August 28th – 7 pm:** *Space Is the Place (A March for Sun Ra)* (2011) + *Crow Requiem* (2015) + *Pilgrim* (2016) + *Three Songs About Liberation* (2017) + *Sojourner* (2018) This program gathers five of Smith's shorts from a decade in which procession, song, and pilgrimage became her primary tools for imagining collective liberation. *Space Is the Place* records the spontaneous, rain-soaked performance of a Chicago high school marching band playing Sun Ra's 1972 composition among the bronze zodiac statues of Chinatown Square, while *Crow Requiem* forms links between the migratory patterns of crows, the Underground Railroad, and innovations in early stereoscopic photography shot on location in upstate New York. In *Pilgrim*, a live recording of an Alice Coltrane piano performance accompanies a visual track documenting a pilgrimage across the U.S. to historic sites of creativity and generosity, a theme Smith deepens in *Sojourner*, where women reimagine Noah Purifoy's *Outdoor Desert Art Museum* in Joshua Tree as a radical feminist utopia. *Three Songs About Liberation* closes the group with three monologues drawn from Gerda Lerner's Black Women in White America, linking the American civil rights struggle to a longer history of liberation movements. Taken together, the five works move between music, myth, and migration, circling the question that shadows the whole of Smith's practice: not whether utopia is attainable, but what it costs to keep reaching for it anyway. **Saturday, August 29th – 7 pm:** *The Volcano Manifesto: My Caldera* (2022) + *Mines to Caves* (2023) + *The Deep West Assembly* (2024) *The Volcano Manifesto* film trilogy is comprised of three recent short films by Smith: *My Caldera*, *Mines to Caves*, and *The Deep West Assembly*. The works unfold complex, non-linear meditations on geological and cinematic time. Through magma eruptions, geological excavations, and a survey of the American West that foregrounds its legacies of imperialism and extraction, Smith mines social and environmental history to sift for what might still form after the collapse of empire. — Cauleen Smith (b. Riverside, California, 1967) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her BFA from San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, and her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Smith is the recipient of several grants and awards, including the 2022 Heinz Award; a Guggenheim Fellowship; the Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize; the Ellsworth Kelly Award; the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts; and a Rauschenberg Residency. Smith’s works have been featured in solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco;; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston; and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.. Her work is included in numerous public collections, such as the Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Studio Museum in Harlem; Smithsonian American Art Museum; and Whitney Museum of American Art. Smith is a faculty member in the UCLA Department of Art. ***Cauleen Smith: A Survey of Films*** is organized by HR’s executive director, John Burple. Add to calendar Google Calendar iCalendar Outlook 365 Outlook Live