Armory 2025 Cauleen Smith, ART 149: Music for Visual Thinking

Press Release

At the Armory Show 2025, Corbett vs. Dempsey is pleased to present ART 149: Music for Visual Thinking, a selection of new work by Cauleen Smith. At the center of the booth is a kinetic neon titled “Sunshine (for Brayla, Merci, Shakiie, Draya, Tatiana, and Bree, Riah, Dominique,...)” (2020), in which the text lines are illuminated in an upward sequence, articulating lyrics from Roy Ayers’ 1976 song “Everybody Loves the Sunshine.” On the walls around this singular work are drawings from a new series, “ART 149: Music for Visual Thinking,” which come from Smith’s method of teaching an interdisciplinary studio course of the same name at UCLA. At the start of each class period, Smith plays vinyl records. “Sometimes I don’t tell them what I’m going to play,” says the artist. “I just turn off the lights, which is their cue to spread themselves out on the carpets that we unfurl in the middle of the room. And we listen. Always analog, always in the dark, at least one side (20 minutes), sometimes a full album. Once it concludes, I talk to them a bit about the music. And then we get to the day’s work. I offer the records up as a neurological reset and an inter-media frame for whatever we might be discussing or doing for the next four hours.”

The “ART 149: Music for Visual Thinking” drawings follow up on related groups of works that Smith has unveiled previously, both the “Human_3.0 Reading List” series and “BLK FMNST Loaner Library” series, all of which featuring a vivid image of a book of some significance to the artist, always held out in her hand, as a gift or tribute. Turning to records (LPs, a single, and a cassette) in a wide range of genres (soul, jazz, funk, disco, experimental, prog, reggae, spirituals), from Funkadelic and Sylvester to Julius Eastman and Alice Coltrane to Laurie Anderson and prison work songs, these are both totemic offerings – honorifics of inspiration aimed at spreading the word about the music and the music’s makers – and they are also simple and wondrous acts of generosity in themselves, as drawings. This exchange is enacted positionally, intersubjectively – the gifting hand is the hand of the artist, and also, by inference, the hand of the viewer. All rendered in gouache on black paper, perhaps suggesting the darkened listening environment, this series of works suggests the centrality of music to Cauleen Smith’s practice as well as its pivotal role in Black social life – as impetus, as heritage, as lingua franca, and as bulwark against amnesia.

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