Explore

@blackskhaiku.blacksky.app Oct 8, 2026, 10:08 AM

own one.
gift one.

#blackskycreatives #creatorsofblacksky
#blackskyart #locsky #blackskyzen
#AllWeWantIsToBeOurselves

👇🏾
blackskhaiku.com/product/3129...

Love Us Out Loud Twist Tote with cream handles (front & back) images pictured on a red black & green background.

Totes feature the image of a full head of henna'd hair in a twist out style filling four quadrants each on the front and back. Centered on the front in bold black lettering with gold and red outline are the words:

LOVE
US
OUT
LOUD

THE SECOND image is the reverse Side of the tote featuring the same image layout but the haiku which reads:

not for an instant
have we desired to be
any but ourselves
blackskhaiku

@blackskhaiku.blacksky.app Oct 8, 2026, 10:08 AM

love
us
out
loud

not for an instant
have we desired to be
any but ourselves

#Blackskhaiku #creatorsofblacksky #BlackskyZen
#blackskywrites ##blackskyart #loudandproud

@origindirectory.bsky.social Oct 7, 2026, 3:03 AM

Beautiful spotlight on Cauleen Smith 🖤 Black creators like her deserve global visibility. If you or artists you spotlight are looking to get found worldwide — Origin Directory is the FREE global directory for the African diaspora. List FREE today 👉 origindirectory.com #BlackSkyArt #BlackSky

@iduhouse.bsky.social Oct 7, 2026, 1:32 AM

📽️ Artist of the Day: Cauleen Smith

Cauleen Smith works across film, installation, and community practice to imagine Black futures shaped by care, joy, and collective vision. Her art asks what liberation looks like when we design it together.

#CreatorsAtWork #Skystorians #BlackSky #BlackSkyArt #Art

Portrait of Cauleen Smith in her studio, photographed by Joshua Franzos for the 2022 Heinz Awards. Smith stands at a worktable covered in white paper, one hand resting on it and the other at her hip. She wears dark green trousers, a pale pink sheer blouse with a ruffled placket and blue-framed glasses. Behind her, painted panels fill the room with washed bands of blue, pink, yellow, green, and rust; fragments of handwritten words hover through the color. The portrait places Smith inside the layered environment her practice has become known for. She trained as a filmmaker, earning her BA at San Francisco State and MFA at UCLA, but her work expanded beyond a single screen into banners, textiles, sculpture, sound, projection, procession, and room-sized installation. Experimental cinema still provides the grammar. Structural film, Third World Cinema, science fiction, Black feminist thought, and histories of Black music become tools for asking how images shape us and how communities might imagine themselves otherwise. By the time this photograph was made, the Heinz Foundation was honoring Smith for a practice that keeps changing form. Her 2017 Whitney Biennial presentation included hand-sewn banners carried through New York in a musical procession; Give It or Leave It later joined film, light, disco balls, objects, and architecture into environments about Alice Coltrane, Noah Purifoy, Rebecca Cox Jackson, and radical generosity. Smith has described her work as an offering to Black diasporic invention, survival, and generativity. That idea helps explain the studio behind her. Painting leaks into text; cinema leaves the screen; research becomes atmosphere. In 2026, the same method has reached the Venice Biennale through The Wanda Coleman Songbook, a multisensory portrait of Los Angeles. The forms keep moving, but the question remains: what worlds become possible when Black imagination is treated not as escape, but as a way of building reality?

Production still from Cauleen Smith’s 2018 film Sojourner. Under the desert sun at Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Desert Art Museum in Joshua Tree, an ensemble of women pose across a concrete platform beneath exposed roof beams. Their clothes turn the group into visual rhythm: lime yellow, green plaid, red satin, black-and-white geometric print, purple, denim, florals, headwraps, jewelry, visors, and bright socks. At center, a woman in a fitted black-and-white jumpsuit steps forward while others sit, stand, lean into one another, or gaze upward. Smith built this scene as a reimagining of a 1966 photograph by Life photographer Bill Ray showing nine Black men near Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers. She changes the gendered center of gravity and relocates the gathering to Purifoy’s desert environment, where discarded material had already become art and social thought. Purifoy helped found the Watts Towers Art Center, made assemblages from debris after the 1965 Watts Rebellion, and later turned ten acres of Joshua Tree desert into an museum. Sojourner brings that history into conversation with other Black experiments in community: Alice Coltrane’s Vedantic ashram, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Sojourner Truth, and the Combahee River Collective. Their words and ideas move through the film like messages across time. Smithsonian curator Saisha Grayson describes the young women as liberation messengers, carrying radios and listening for what earlier generations transmit. Smith is less interested in utopia as fantasy than in people who practiced pieces of it through collective life, spiritual discipline, art, feminism, and mutual responsibility. The cast’s futuristic styling does not ask us to abandon history. It asks what happens when history becomes usable material for another future. In this frame, community itself is the image: many bodies, many styles, one temporary constellation. Smith replaces the heroic lone visionary with something more demanding and more hopeful, a world built together.

Portrait of Cauleen Smith photographed by G L Askew II for the Los Angeles Times in 2023. Smith stands against a beige wall with her hands clasped, wearing a black button-front blouse scattered with tiny white specks, a chunky silver chain, and a pleated black skirt whose lower edge erupts into a multicolored printed image. Her locs frame her face and she looks slightly upward with a small smile. The photograph accompanied an unusual project: Smith interviewed Los Angeles artist George Evans, brother of poet Wanda Coleman, while following the cultural routes that shaped them both. Smith had returned to Los Angeles after years away and was using Coleman’s writing as a guide through what Coleman called the city’s “Deep West,” where glamour, racism, Black invention, labor, migration, and myth coexist. Evans opened doors into that history. He spoke about his family’s advertising business, Black-owned Golden State Mutual Life Insurance and its art collection, Beat poets in Echo Park, the Watts Rebellion, and meeting Noah Purifoy while Purifoy gathered fire-scarred debris from the streets. For Smith, the conversation deepened a lineage she already felt as a Northern California-born Black artist shaped by West Coast experimental culture. She was researching Coleman because she heard music inside her poetry. That research grew into The Wanda Coleman Songbook, first presented in New York in 2024 and now part of the 2026 Venice Biennale. There, four channels surround visitors with lowriders, flower stalls, liquor stores, the Hollywood Hills, Baldwin Hills oil wells, and Coleman’s books, while seven Black composers respond to lines. The installation turns Los Angeles into sound, image, scent, memory, and argument. Seen from that later chapter, this portrait records Smith not only as an artist but as a listener. Her practice often begins by finding a person, place, archive, or artwork whose signal is still alive, then building a form generous enough for others to hear it too.

Installation view of Cauleen Smith’s Epistrophy, 2018, inside the darkened exhibition Give It or Leave It. A taxidermied black raven bends over a rock at left; potted snake plants rise under magenta light; shells, stones, vessels, a radio, books, trays, and found things sit among four video monitors. One screen shows a sunlit landscape, while large projections spill fragments of sky, terrain, and figures onto the walls. Closed-circuit cameras aim at the tabletop, combining these intimate objects with moving backgrounds so that a small sculpture can suddenly inhabit a desert, a cosmic horizon, or some invented elsewhere. Smith calls the objects an archive of associations, travels, affections, desires, questions, and longings. The title comes from Thelonious Monk’s composition “Epistrophy,” and improvisation is central to the work. Smith also connects the piece to the Art Ensemble of Chicago and its use of “little instruments,” bells, toys, gongs, bird calls, whistles, and other sound-makers that widened what Black experimental music could contain. Epistrophy asks what an equivalent might look like in expanded cinema. Instead of treating filmmaking as camera plus screen, Smith lets plants, minerals, figurines, surveillance technology, NASA imagery, National Geographic landscapes, memory, and chance become instruments. Cameras watch the objects, but the objects escape ordinary meanings as projections enlarge and relocate them. First shown at ICA Philadelphia in 2018, Epistrophy became part of Smith’s traveling Give It or Leave It exhibition and entered LACMA’s collection. The work reveals why Smith’s installations are not simply films displayed in galleries. She builds conditions for perception. A raven, plant, cheap figurine, or glass vessel may be mundane alone; beside an unfamiliar object and projected into another world, it becomes a portal. The audience completes the circuit by making associations of its own.

@sillygenius.blacksky.app Oct 5, 2026, 1:34 AM

putting the feelers out there for more Black artists to interact with on here. plug me in, y’all.
these street signs are an ongoing thing I started in ‘22 for my first solo show, Streets is Swatchin
#BlackskyArt

@iduhouse.bsky.social Sep 24, 2026, 5:16 PM

Want to jump in?

Creators at Work feed:
bsky.app/profile/did:...

Curated creator list:
bsky.app/profile/iduh...

Subscribe to the list, explore the feed, and tag #CreatorsAtWork so we can find and support what you're making!

🎥 #MusicSky #MusicianSky #BlackSky #BlackSkyART

@blackskynews.blacksky.app Sep 21, 2026, 1:13 AM

Marking the 20th anniversary of The Gordon Parks Foundation, Voices in the Mirror will be on view at New York's Jack Shainman Gallery through November 7, 2026. | Sage Helene

mymodernmet.com/gordon-parks... #BlackskyNews #BlackskyArt

@blackskhaiku.blacksky.app Sep 19, 2026, 10:05 PM

to converse with fools
degrades quality discourse
marring true exchange

#blackskhaiku #blackskyart #blackskycreatives
#writingcommunity