Ming Smith: Jazz Requiem – Notations in Blue brings the work of one of photography’s most singular voices to the Mattatuck Museum, where images from the 1970s to the present settle into a long view of a career shaped by movement, music and improvisation. Opening August 29, 2026, the exhibition places Smith’s photographs in a frame that emphasizes not only subject matter, but atmosphere: the restless motion, soft blur and visual rhythm that have defined her practice for decades.
Smith’s photographs resist the blunt terms of documentation. She has long worked with double exposure, hand-coloring, collage and controlled blur, turning the camera into a tool for perception rather than straight recording. In this exhibition, many of the prints appear for the first time, giving added weight to images that capture Black life with intimacy and complexity. Scenes of performance, portraiture and everyday presence carry a sense of immediacy, yet they also feel suspended, as if holding onto a passing note.
The show reflects the influence of jazz and dance, two forms that shaped Smith’s visual language. That influence does not appear as illustration; it shows up in timing, cadence and feeling. Ming Smith photographs often sit between dream and document, with figures emerging from shadow or dissolving into light. The result is a body of work that treats photography as an art of rhythm, one that listens as much as it sees.
Curated by Daisy Desrosiers, the exhibition also traces Smith’s formative years in Europe, a period that broadened her sense of place and sharpened her attention to identity. Across the installation, those experiences read as part of a larger pursuit: to own the image, to control the terms of representation, and to make Black experience visible on its own terms. Jazz Requiem does not present Smith as a historical footnote. It presents her as a continuing force, one whose work still expands what photography can hold.
Image: Ming Smith, Pharoah Sanders and the Bottom Line,1977, archival pigment print on dibond, 47 x 72 inches. Courtesy of the artist and The Gund at Kenyon College
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