Cherise Smith

A lavishly illustrated catalogue that features an eclectic mix of poetic, narrative, and scholarly perspectives on Nick Cave's Mammoth.Nick Cave--born 1959 in Fulton, Missouri, and now active in Chicago, Illinois--is an artist who defies categorization. Working between sculpture, installation, performance, video and fashion, and best known for the exuberant Soundsuits that he originally created in response to racialized police violence, Cave has long been interested in the intersections of history and identity. Like the landmark exhibition it accompanies, this catalogue is a creative excavation of shared and personal memory. The mammoth represents hidden stories waiting to be uncovered and rediscovered. Cave's bronze sculptures, beaded wall hangings, video and found-object assemblages, tell stories of identity, environmental crisis, societal inequality, and institutional history.The book also features a sketchbook-style exploration of Cave's studio and mind, including in-process photography, artist sketches, and handwritten notes. This wide-ranging publication represents a significant contribution to scholarship on the artist, and will be a lasting resource for artists, art historians, and general readers.

Smithsonian American Art Museum's 2021 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American ArtMichael Ray Charles is the most comprehensive presentation yet of the work of an artist who rose to prominence in the 1990s for works that engaged American stereotypes of African Americans. With a background in advertising and an archivist’s inquisitiveness, Charles developed an artistic practice that made startling use of found images and offered critiques of the narratives they fostered. Immersing readers in the imagination of this daring painter, Michael Ray Charles celebrates and contextualizes a singular, major figure in the art world.Art historian Cherise Smith collaborated with the artist to curate nearly one hundred color plates documenting nearly thirty years of visual art. These plates are framed by an interview with the artist and by Smith’s own deep interpretive essay on Charles’s work. Smith explores topics ranging from the controversy resulting from Charles’s provocative appropriations of stereotypical racial material to his techniques of sampling from popular culture, and from his commentaries on African American men and sports to his work with director Spike Lee on Bamboozled. Both clear-eyed and complex, this retrospective demonstrates the significant role that Michael Ray Charles’s work has played in defining what art is today.

The artists Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin, Anna Deavere Smith, and Nikki S. Lee have all crossed racial, ethnic, gender, and class boundaries in works that they have conceived and performed. Cherise Smith analyzes their complex engagements with issues of identity through close readings of a significant performance, or series of performances, by each artist. She examines Piper’s public embodiment of the Mythic Being, a working-class black man, during the early 1970s; Antin’s full-time existence as the fictitious black ballerina Eleanora Antinova for several weeks in 1981; and Smith’s shifting among more than twenty characters of different ages and racial, ethnic, gender, and class backgrounds in Twilight: Los Angeles. She also considers Lee’s performances of membership in cultural groups-including swing dancers, hip-hop devotees, skateboarders, drag queens, and yuppies-in her Projects series (1997–2001). The author historicizes the politics of identity by exploring each performance in relation to the discourses prevalent in the United States at the time of its development. She is attentive to how the artists manipulated clothing, mannerisms, voice, and other signs to negotiate their assumed identities. Cherise Smith argues that by drawing on conventions such as passing, blackface, minstrelsy, cross-dressing, and drag, they highlighted the constructedness and fluidity of identity and identifications. Enacting Others provides a provocative account of how race informs contemporary art and feminist performance practices.

The artists Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin, Anna Deavere Smith, and Nikki S. Lee have all crossed racial, ethnic, gender, and class boundaries in works that they have conceived and performed. Cherise Smith analyzes their complex engagements with issues of identity through close readings of a significant performance, or series of performances, by each artist. She examines Piper’s public embodiment of the Mythic Being, a working-class black man, during the early 1970s; Antin’s full-time existence as the fictitious black ballerina Eleanora Antinova for several weeks in 1981; and Smith’s shifting among more than twenty characters of different ages and racial, ethnic, gender, and class backgrounds in Twilight: Los Angeles. She also considers Lee’s performances of membership in cultural groups-including swing dancers, hip-hop devotees, skateboarders, drag queens, and yuppies-in her Projects series (1997–2001). The author historicizes the politics of identity by exploring each performance in relation to the discourses prevalent in the United States at the time of its development. She is attentive to how the artists manipulated clothing, mannerisms, voice, and other signs to negotiate their assumed identities. Cherise Smith argues that by drawing on conventions such as passing, blackface, minstrelsy, cross-dressing, and drag, they highlighted the constructedness and fluidity of identity and identifications. Enacting Others provides a provocative account of how race informs contemporary art and feminist performance practices.