Ming Smith

1950 | Detroit, United States
Informations
Ming Smith — AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes

Ming Smith, Self-Portrait (1972), from the Self-Portrait Series, c. 1990, archival pigment print, collage, oil paint, reprinted and painted in 2019, 24 x 18 in. (60.96 x 45.7 cm) © Ming Smith 2022

American photographer.

Photographer Ming Smith graduated from Howard University in 1973 with a Bachelor of Science in Microbiology. She moved to New York City and eventually settled in Greenwich Village. There she pursued a career as a model – working for Wilhelmina Models, Ford Models and Pauline’s, a top agency in Paris, where she became the first Black L’Oréal Ambassador – while beginning to take photographs. Her early photographic subjects include Puerto Rican crime-fighting group the Young Lords and the novelist James Baldwin, her neighbour. She also took dance classes after learning about Katherine Dunham, an artistic influence that permeates her own photographic practice.

M. Smith often employs blurring, double exposure, and even paint in her black-and-white and color photographs. Such techniques lend her evocative and lyrical photographs a painterly and spiritual quality. She is known for her poetic street scenes as well as portraits of important Black cultural figures such as musician Sun Ra in Sun Ra Space II (New York)(1978) and her friend and fellow model Grace Jones, captured in Grace Jones at Studio 54 (1978).

In 1973, at the invitation of photographer Louis Draper (1935-2002), she became the sole female member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of Black photographers founded in Harlem in 1963. The first publication of her work was also in 1973, when four of her photographs appeared in the first volume of The Black Photographers Annual, a showcase of the work of Black photographers self-published by the collective. M. Smith’s major breakthrough came when she dropped off a portfolio of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in 1979. She was mistakenly regarded as a delivery person until a museum representative discovered the photographs were hers. The museum purchased two of her photographs – David Murray in the Wings (1978) and Christmas Constellation (1978) – making her the first Black American woman photographer to have her work acquired by MoMA.

In 1981 M. Smith was invited by Linda Goode Bryant to participate in Artists Who Do Other Art Forms, an exhibition at the former’s legendary gallery Just Above Midtown (JAM). From 2010, M. Smith’s career has had a resurgence. She was included in the landmark exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 at the Brooklyn Museum and Soul of a Nation at the Tate Modern, both in 2017. Her first book, Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph was published in 2020, collecting four decades of M. Smith’s photographs. The same year, her work was featured in the group exhibition Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoinge Workshop at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition travelled to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. The following year, Ming Smith: Evidence became the inaugural exhibition at the Nicola Vassell Gallery. Her photographs are in the collections of prominent museums including the National Gallery of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Uri McMillan

A biography produced as part of “The Origin of Others” research programme, in partnership with the Clark Art Institute.

© Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions
Ming Smith — AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes

Ming Smith, Maynard Jackson (the first African-American Southern Mayor) and Vernon Jordan on the Television, New York, NY, 1973, gelatin silver print, 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm), Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), © 2022 Ming Smith

Ming Smith — AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes

Ming Smith, James Baldwin in setting sun over Harlem, New York, 1979, gelatin silver print, 13 3/8 x 18 ¾ in. (33.97 x 116.2 cm), © Ming Smith 2022

Ming Smith — AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes

Ming Smith, Christmas Constellation, Brussels, Belgium, 1978, gelatin silver print, 18 3/8 × 13 1/4″ (46.5 × 33.5 cm), MoMA, Acquired through the generosity of the Vera Louise Fraser Estate © 2022 Ming Smith

Ming Smith — AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes

Ming Smith, Sun Ra, Space II, New York, 1978, printed 2020, inkjet print, image, 24 × 36 in. (61 × 91.4 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, purchase with funds from the Photography Committee 2021.74, © Ming Smith

Ming Smith — AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes

Ming Smith, Grace Jones at Studio 54, 1978, archival pigment print, 24 ½ x 36 in. (62.23 x 91.44 cm) © Ming Smith 2022

Ming Smith — AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes

Ming Smith, David Murray in the Wings, Padova, Italy, 1978, hand-painted gelatin silver print, 19 1/2 × 12 5/8″ (49.5 × 32.0 cm), MoMA, Acquired through the generosity of the Vera Louise Fraser Estate © 2022 Ming Smith

Ming Smith — AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes

Ming Smith, Tina Turner, What’s Love Got To Do With It, 1984, gelatin silver print, 36 x 28 ¾ in. (91.44 x 167 cm), © Ming Smith 2022

Ming Smith — AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes

Ming Smith, Self Portrait as Josephine, New York, 1986, printed 2020, inkjet print, 26 ¼ × 18 in. (66.7 × 45.7 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, purchase with funds from the Photography Committee 2021.77, © Ming Smith

Ming Smith — AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes

Ming Smith, Harlem Gardens, Purple, gelatin silver print (hand painted) © Ming Smith 2022

Magazine
Linked articles
Explore
Linked themes
Artists
Discover other artists

Archives
of Women Artists
Research
& Exhibitions

Facebook - AWARE Twitter - AWARE Instagram - AWARE
Villa Vassilieff - 21, avenue du Maine 75015 Paris (France) — info[at]aware-art[.]org — +33 (0)1 55 26 90 29