Ming Smith

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.

Smith was the first Black female photographer acquired by the Museum of Modern Art and the first female member of the influential Black photography collective, Kamoinge. She was also one of the first African American women to break the color barrier in modeling alongside Toukie Smith. Smith began working for some of the top agencies in Paris, such as Wilhelmina Models, Ford Models and Pauline’s, where she became the first Black L’Oréal Ambassador – while beginning to take photographs. She was one of the iconic dancers in Tina Turner’s 1984 hit “What’s Love Got to Do With It”, music video, where she captured the historic photo of Turner during the filming.

Smith is the recipient of the 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Center of Photography, and the 2023 Alain Locke International Award. In 2021 she received the Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was honored as a trail blazing woman in photography at the 2020 Aperture Gala. In November 2020, Ming Smith released her book, Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph. Smith’s work is in museum collections including the National Gallery of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Smith is a graduate of Howard University. Smith’s previous group exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art’s Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography; Brooklyn Museum of Art’s We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85; Smart Museum’s “Down Time: On the Art of Retreat”. Current exhibitions include Going Dark at the Guggenheim Museum, which will be on view until April 7^th, 2024. Smith’s series Transcendence, will be on view for the first time in its entirety this fall at the Columbus Museum of Art. Her series Africa will also be on view at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus Ohio for an upcoming solo exhibition this fall titled Ming Smith: Wind Chime. Smithlives and works in New York City.

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Jenkins Johnson Gallery will participate in Art Basel Miami Beach, December 8 - 10, 2023 Booth B31. We will feature artists that explore social and political issues of the African Diaspora by connecting past and current moments: Mary Lovelace O'Neal, Wadsworth Jarrell, Gordon Parks, Ming Smith, Patrick Alston, Adrian Burrell, Dewey Crumper, Lisa Corinne Davis, Violet Fields, Alex Jackson, Blessing Ngobeni, Gregory Rick, Enrico Riley, and Raelis Vasquez. Jenkins Johnson Gallery will be participating in the Kabinett sector with a solo presentation of works on paper by Mary Lovelace O'Neal, featuring her iconic Lampblack (1970's) and Desert Women (1990's) series. In the Lampblack drawings she layers black charcoal and pastel, allowing slivers of negative space to invade the surface. These drawings speak to her affair with an "uncluttered minimalist viewpoint", invoking both a cultural and aesthetic sentiment. In Desert Women series, Lovelace O'Neal portrays garments worn in the Sahara Desert in Egypt and the Atacama Desert in Chile. She studied with master printmaker James Lesene Wells and at The Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Lovelace O'Neal creates based on feeling and perception, forming moments of fleeting light. Her work is in museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Baltimore Museum, DeYoung Museum, and Brooklyn Museum. She has an upcoming solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in Spring 2024.