This story appears in our Spring Art + Performance 2025 Issue, published on March 5, 2025.

GALLERY A: Cauleen Smith The Wanda Coleman Songbook, 2024

Oh shit, it is that time of year. Dead of grey-gloom winter, freezing rain, and everybody falling dowwn on the tightly packed bricks of the University of Washington’s Red Square. Slippery, so slippery in the rain because it was designed that way in the 1970s. If you fall, blame a boomer.

After my dad marched with students, comrades, against the Vietnam war, assembling in spaces and occupying buildings on campus, the University redesigned this vast central gathering place to more easily knock down protestors with firehoses. Architectural innovations to discourage uprising. The labyrinthine architecture of the building that housed my major’s department creates a series of honeycomb-shaped sections, impossible for protestors to entirely take over, or students to find their professors’ offices.

I’m walking over these bricks, time traveling across rain-slicked Red Square into the Quad. Returning to the place where I was a student, returning as a grownass woman, a professor. Stepping in and out of past and present, my feet follow the same routes, this place familiar and unrecognizable all at once, the person I was, who I am now meeting each other, walking with all these ghosts. The site of my liberation, catalyzed by mentors, teachers, and friends. Where I met other Jews, American and Israeli, who showed me a path other than Zionism. Where I became friends with a Palestinian who drove me around in his black Trans Am. Strolling under cherry trees after a year-and-a-half of Palestinian genocide. Where student protestors were demonized. Under the same cherry trees that burst with heart-breaking blossoms back when I was 19 in April of 1992. My freshman-year dorm friend from LA ran, screamed, and swung at those gnarled trunks, propelled by the acquittal of the pigs caught on video beating Rodney King.

I walk under still-bare branches, thinking about the recent LA fires. I spot a few tiny tight buds, pink in the mid-winter gloom.

I arrive at the newly remodeled Jacob Lawrence Gallery—it wasn’t where I remembered it. As I push through heavy curtains into Cauleen Smith’s installation The Wanda Coleman Songbook, I step onto soft rugs, into warm, dimmed light, and through a wormhole to Los Angeles. Four floor-to-ceiling projections surround me. Walls are transformed into slow-moving scenes from locations scattered across the city. Long tracking shots of candy-colored car parades, a skateboarder weaving in and out of shadows, an oil derrick silhouetted by sunset, the sea’s shifting light from day to night, the moon glowering behind clouds. Streets and signs, birds preening on powerlines. Panoramas of Griffith Park, taillights streaming down freeways, close-ups of streams trickling through green grasses. Travel along overpasses, cruise past strip malls and sidewalks, idle by a roller coaster zippering up tracks at dusk.

Cauleen Smith’s camera tunes into the city’s idioms, inviting us to witness the granular, the unspectacular, to linger with the overlooked, all guided by Los Angeles poet Wanda Coleman’s words. Cozy swivel chairs and floor pillows beckon—have a seat, stay a while. Time and space shift, move differently around us. I am entranced.

Smith had studied art at UCLA, and she created this installation out of her experience of returning to Los Angeles in 2017, navigating “a terrain which was simultaneously familiar and alien.” Returning to the UW, unsettled by time and change myself, toggling between what was and what is, my experience softened by one constant—the rain—I’m stepping through paraspaces, the between-worlds, the places invisible to some. All of this reverberates as I settle into Smith’s collaboration across time with Coleman and LA. “LA is a shy one, real one, and a terrible beauty. You can’t really see how gorgeous it is in a drive-by, you have to sit with the banality, the horrors, the wildness of the city until it becomes legible,” Cauleen Smith writes in the liner notes of The Wanda Coleman Songbook album.

Stay in the sensory experience of a place. Dig into meaning. Sit with it. This art is an antidote to dislocation. Art that awakens, demanding full-body engagement. Open fully to it, open a book, open to transformation through Black visions and stories and songs transmitted over space and time. This piece constantly shifts, sifting through my entire being—sight, sound, touch, and, yes, smell. It not only memorializes LA but catalyzes me in its loving and furious embrace.

In the middle of the gallery a console curves like a comma, with a turntable mounted in voluptuous wood spinning songs from Wanda’s words. The sonic heart of the Songbook. Linger. Listen.

…her poems actualized as songs seemed like a way to move her words into the here and now and get them to bounce off the walls the way they reverberate in my skull…

Music makes space... this album… is a partial account of a Los Angeles that I would like to hold a little more dear.

The needle drops. Pink splatter vinyl spins Meshell Ndegeocello’s voice from grooves out into soundwaves. Wanda Coleman’s poems spiral from the center, spoken and sung and vibrating the space. Somewhere between ode and visitation, riffing on lines from the poem “The Saturday Afternoon Blues”:

saturday afternoons are killers

and I am on my own

can kill

can fade your life away

can kill

and I am on my own

the man i love can kill

can fade your life away

can kill

the man i love is grief

and i am on my own

I think, my heart is a fist I want to unclench.

The writing is projected on the wall. Close-ups of hands holding a book of her poetry, the camera glances at the text on a page, never lingering long enough to read the entire poem. A few lines reach out, fingering through our eyes into our minds, her words ripple out from the throats and instruments and hands of musicians, Black women, songs heard nowhere else but this in space. These recordings are not available to stream or download or listen to anywhere but here, inside The Wanda Coleman Songbook. Her poems travel through time and reach us just in time.

My own memories layer on top of one another, once molten mantle now hardened strata of catastrophe and rebirth. This residue forms rocks called abyssal peridotites. I remember walking around a Los Angeles of the past, full of wonder. The dusty sidewalk’s gift—a perfect lemon, free! And now the ache of landscape altered—the people pushed out, the ashes, the greed, the bullshitters, the ghosts.

the tombs are fertile with sacred

rememberings, the ancient rhymes, the

disasters of couplings, the turbulent blaze of

greed’s agonies, shadows reaching for time and time

unraveling and undone.

(Side B – The Weather, track 3: “American Sonnet 18 – After June Jordan” song by Kelsey Lu)

GALLERY B: Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press, Detroit, 1965

I pushed through the thick curtains bookending Gallery A into the neighboring bright white Gallery B to meet the Jacob Lawrence Gallery’s new director and curator, Jordan Jones. We sit at the large table in the middle of the current Broadside Press exhibit. Single-sheet poems and pocket-size poetry books line the walls. More objects to touch, encouraging interaction, just as with The Wanda Coleman Songbook. In a rush of mutual passion, we discuss the show’s themes.

This is a show about books. Detroit, 1965. Dudley Randall, a poet and librarian, started Broadside Press with $12 of his own money. He said, “I can’t find anywhere to publish my own poems. So I’m sure other poets are having the same problem.” He saved every single rejection letter, documenting his labor navigating the publishing industry by saving the receipts. A true archivist. Then he took the means of production into his own hands. He began printing broadsides, single-sheet poems, with one poem on each.

“I publish for the man in the street, and most of my books are priced at $1, so that he can afford to buy them.” –Dudley Randall

“He wants anyone and everyone to have access to poetry,” Jones tells me. “It’s urgent and thought-out. You can have it anywhere—fold it up, put it in your wallet, put it on your fridge, give it to a friend, in an exchange—[in the way] that a big heavy anthology can’t. Their output is incredible. Any name in Black poetry you can think of, they worked with.”

Broadside became the key literary press of the Black Arts Movement, launching the careers of poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, poets who, at that time, couldn’t find avenues elsewhere. The luminary voices who reshaped the literary landscape, cornerstones of my cannon, whose words and ideas are embedded in my internal landscape.

In this show, Jones threads and interconnects “a continuum of practices happening in Black communities across time.” From Cauleen Smith’s collaborative practice in present-day LA to the way community was built around Broadside Press in 1960s Detroit, to what Jacob Lawrence learned growing up during the 1930s Harlem Renaissance.

“What a gift of a space to grow up in,” says Jones. “This explosion in Black creative production, where artists and poets and writers and musicians and dancers and theater makers were all creating in this tight geographic zone, all aware of each other’s work, showing up for one another, collaborating and in dialogue. That is an amazing cultural soup to grow up in and have access to.”

Lawrence carried that energy of the Harlem Renaissance to Seattle in 1970. For 30 years at the University of Washington, he taught art-making skills in the context of community knowledge, fostering cross-disciplinary collaboration. Early in his tenure, he painted a series, “The Builders,” connecting labor, construction, and community bonds. As a young man, he learned trade skills, and found the builders and their tools beautiful. He collected tools throughout his life, tools to use and honor and empower—distributing the means of production.

Lawrence’s creation of community at the UW and out into the city inspires Jones’s curation. She wants to create experiential spaces that prompt people to spend time in it. To sit. Move beyond the surface of passive consumption, and understand that viewers activate the art. Art that invites shared study.

“The experience of it is also a way to get you to the books,” she says. “The books are in the show, and there for you to read and spend time with. I saw this work for the first time a year ago in New York when it debuted at 52 Walker Gallery and was just gobsmacked by it. And it happened to be that my office at the time was around the corner. So I kept coming back, coming back, and coming back—spent lunchtime breaks there sitting in the space.”

I did not want to leave; when I got home, I felt haunted.

I climbed back through the UW’s portal to Los Angeles to return to The Wanda Coleman Songbook a few days later. I sat in the space, mostly alone, mostly still. Moving every 15 minutes to turn the record over, and over, and over I don’t know how many times. Slowly, slowly rotating in my twirly chair, like a giant rotisserie basting in the orange glow of this L.A., looping my body along the film loop’s four projections. I lost myself in the music, the myriad iterations of aural visual combinations. Mesmerized, I forgot to read the poetry book in my hands. I felt my body hovering, as though I was floating on my back in the sea. And finally, I caught the scent of Griffith Park.

when you split you took all the wisdom

and left me the worry

(Side A – Miles In the Night, track 3: “in that other fantasy where we live forever” song by Jeff Parker & Ruby Parker)

See artists & poets at the Jacob Lawrence Gallery through April 19.