Ming Smith:   Transcendence

Photographs by Ming Smith
Poetry by Jacqueline Woodson

Traveling Exhibition
Dates Available 2025- 2027

Tour Management

Following a highly acclaimed presentation at the Columbus Museum of Art, photographer Ming Smith's exhibition Transcendence is being made available as a traveling exhibition for circulation world wide.

For nearly five decades, Smith has charted a groundbreaking artistic legacy, including as the first woman member of the Kamoinge Workshop — the influential collective of Black photographers formed in New York in the 1960s — and later as the first Black woman photographer to have their work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. Widely recognized for her portraits of Black cultural leaders, including James Baldwin, Grace Jones, and Nina Simone, Smith’s photographs conjure a vibrancy and aliveness akin to the rhythms of jazz and the blues, as the artist herself has noted. Smith’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many institutions across the globe. 

Transcendence surpasses the confines of traditional photography; it is a deeply intimate exploration of Ming’s reconciliation with her hometown. Inspired by Alice Coltrane’s transformative music, Ming’s series confronts the injustices of her racially divided upbringing in Columbus with compassion and insight.

  Someone’s gonna get shot a look by Mama
  Someone’s gonna to eat too much sugar and moan from a bellyache
  Someone’s gonna to skin their knee
  Someone’s going to act a fool and get shot a look that says
  Boy, when we get home…!
  Someone’s gonna drop their ice cream
  Someone’s gonna spill their soda all over their shirt
  (and get shot a look by Mama)
  Someone’s gonna throw up after a spinning ride
  Because someone was told not to eat that
  funnel cake before they got on said spinning ride so
  someone’s getting shot a look by Mama.
  Someone’s gonna see the boy they like
  Someone’s gonna see the girl they like
  Someone’s gonna get scared in the haunted house
  and be scared of haunted houses
  for the rest of their life.
  Someone’s gonna remember this
  for the rest of their life.