(L.A. in N.Y.)
Cauleen Smith at 52 Walker

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Cauleen Smith, The Wanda Coleman Songbook (installation views) (2024). Installation of four-channel video (27 minutes and 13 seconds), 12-inch vinyl record, record player, console table, scent, cucolorises, couches, and rugs, overall dimensions variable. Images courtesy of the artist and 52 Walker, New York.

Cauleen Smith’s multisensory installation The Wanda Coleman Songbook, staged at 52 Walker in New York City, was a synesthetic revival of Wanda Coleman’s legacy and relationship to California. Regarded as the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles, Coleman wrote poems—ripe with witty candor—that magnified the precarity of her life and society at large with a salient anger akin to that of a blues singer. Smith’s presentation of Songbook honors Coleman’s work and propels her essence from Los Angeles to New York through a sensory reproduction of L.A. The exhibition took design cues from various Angeleno signs and regions in the form of projected iconography, a zig-zag trail of Persian rugs, gray loveseats, and a DJ booth inspired by recording studios.¹ A panoramic four-channel video of L.A. cityscapes panned the gallery’s walls, while traffic and helicopter noises blended with songs played from a vinyl record produced to accompany the exhibition. For this record, Smith invited an intergenerational cohort of experimental musicians to reinterpret Coleman’s poems through song. Songbook is thus an atmospheric project that bridges many decades: The record transforms the work of Black avant-garde artists into an index of oral histories, chronicling Black L.A. and prolonging its life amid threats of its erasure. However, in limiting the accessibility of the auditory document at its center, the exhibition didn’t completely embrace its rich social potential.

The separate, looping video channels projected on each wall coalesced into shots of nostalgic California vistas. Romantic images of Coleman’s books dissolved into nighttime scenes of working-class people catching the bus; daylit scenes of graffitied shipping containers married a shot of an “I Buy Houses / Fast Ca$h” sign; a crow’s stationary silhouette haunted the steady movements of classic Cadillacs gliding on the pavement. A crisp scent meant to conjure L.A.’s spacious Griffith Park, which Smith enlisted a perfumer to develop, filled the gallery as scenes of scorning sunsets turned the whole room red. The tenderness of Smith’s cinematography mixed with the audible musical renditions of Coleman’s vibrant verses perfectly captured the tensions of each L.A. environment and its impact on both the poet’s and artist’s work.

In 2017, when Smith returned to L.A. after a 16-year absence, Coleman’s poems were a catalyst for her reconnection with the city.² Coleman’s lush and honest poems exposed her bitter entanglement with poverty, rejecting a glossy delivery style that would convert hard truths into beautiful images. Coleman’s vulgarity prompts readers to experience how race, gender, and class imposed value systems on her life and daily environment. In “Wanda Why Aren’t You Dead,” we read: “wanda. that’s a whore’s name / wanda why aren’t you rich / … why don’t you lose weight / … can’t you afford to move out of this hell hole.”³ As if quoting an anonymous critic, each line pokes at the poet’s conceptual appearance and economic standing, which put her outside the lines of desirability even as she refuses to contort herself to fit inside these lines. Like Coleman, Smith’s sensitivity toward the environments she inhabits shapes her practice, particularly her awareness of how racism, classism, and sexism inform the social architecture of Black communities. Each L.A. scene that overlapped with iterations of Coleman’s words underscored the highs and lows of Black life within a city systematically designed to displace Black communities.

Cauleen Smith, The Wanda Coleman Songbook (installation views) (2024). Installation of four-channel video (27 minutes and 13 seconds), 12-inch vinyl record, record player, console table, scent, cucolorises, couches, and rugs, overall dimensions variable. Images courtesy of the artist and 52 Walker, New York.

The exhibition’s soundtrack included revered icons such as Meshell Ndegeocello and Alice Smith alongside cult favorites like Kelsey Lu and Jamila Woods & Standing on the Corner. Each musician took liberties in reinterpreting Coleman’s witchy sonnets, causing the final product to play out as both a tribute album and a (re)telling. Alice Smith expels, “Will we live forever / We will never ever go,” and during my last visit, these lines paired seamlessly with scenes of flying birds and idyllic sun-kissed parks but became disharmonious when Smith’s video shifted to show congested freeways or hovering helicopters. In this moment, Alice Smith’s interpretation of Coleman’s words felt stifled by the realities of gentrification and surveillance, and the disconnect between the music and footage reminded visitors of a never-ending tension between freedom and fugitivity. Lu, known for their ethereal voice and chamber-pop symphonies, perfectly meshed Coleman’s satirical performance style with their own, switching from soulful to angelic tonal ranges. In an exhibition that bore her name but not her physical presence, Coleman was most alive in the space through Lu’s resurrection. Lu’s singing reenacted elements of the poet’s beloved recitation style, in which Coleman would exaggerate lines with an amber voice and eyes widened. The record reinforced Coleman’s acclaim as a dynamic lyricist and established Smith as a decorated musical producer for the first time.

The most important thing about Songbook is the music. The EP is a perfect device for Smith to (re)fabricate Coleman’s oral history of Black L.A. as it faces erasure. It’s the only aspect of the show that can live outside of 52 Walker and in the homes of many. However, the limited-edition vinyl costs $150, far from the average price of a new record. Inside the cover was a bootleg QR code to a digital copy of the EP, but the link I tried was defunct. Beyond the memory of art and space, a key component of combating erasure is how we’re able to share and (re)tell stories that are significant to our histories. So, with limited access to key source material, should Smith’s presentation only live on through the select few who experienced the exhibition, or who can afford to purchase the album and can exchange whispers from one to another?

This review was originally published in Carla issue 36.

Shameekia Shantel Johnson is a writer, curator, and researcher of Afro-Caribbean descent from New York City. Currently, Johnson is perfecting her nomenclature Red Notes, a body of work that meditates upon the color’s psycho-spiritual relationship to black being and how it conceptualizes in social space.

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