Ming Smith (b. 1947, Detroit, Michigan) captures everyday life through a transcendent and ethereal lens. Her work has a collaborative nature, often featuring legends of the art, music, and literary world of Harlem and beyond. Smith documents everyday moments of Black life, whether it be legends such as Grace Jones and James Baldwin or an anonymous passerby on the street— she creates a dreamlike poignancy for every subject. Smith creates a deliberate blurriness with experimental post-production techniques such as double exposed prints, which amplifies the sacredness of Black life while creating dream-like and vibrational images. Smith played an integral and steadfast role in the New York art scene in the later decades of the 20th century. Herman Poole Blount, better known for much of his life as Sun Ra, was a musical and aesthetic innovator whose legacy cannot be overstated in its influence on what we now call Afrofuturism. Experimental jazz, poetry, film, and theatrical performance art were among Sun Ra’s tools in his expressive vision of philosophy, cosmology, and the empowerment of people of the African diaspora. Ming Smith said of her photos of Sun Ra, “And I just think this is pure energy, when we’re all energy. And moving constantly, the earth rotates around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour, nothing is staying the same. The world, constellations, everything is constantly moving even when we sleep. So, the shimmering light and movement in this photo represent ‘space is the place’,” with the last quoted phrase being a reference to Sun Ra’s film and album of the same name from 1973.