The Library at MAF and Corita Art Center presents Catching Sight with Cauleen Smith and Jeff Parker
Focusing on Corita Kent’s lesser known yet profoundly significant photographic practice, Catching Sight places her work in a broader historical and cultural context, emphasizing the critical role that photographic archives play in the continuous shaping of history, community, and artistic creation. Corita’s camera allowed her to “see for the sake of seeing.” As an artist and arts educator, the photographs she created and collected significantly shaped her artistic practice and teaching methods. For Corita, everything was a source, and photography was not only a creative tool but a way to view the world in new and meaningful ways.
The presentation unfolds as an intimate duet between image and sound, with artist Cauleen Smith orchestrating images drawn from Corita’s extensive collection of over 15,000 35mm slides. To extend this temporal experience, Smith’s selection interplays with live improvisations by guitarist and composer Jeff Parker. The use of an analog slide projection pays homage to Corita’s original teaching methods and public lectures, where this medium was frequently utilized.
Cauleen Smith was raised in Sacramento, California and lives in Los Angeles. Smith is faculty in the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture. Smith holds a BA in Creative Arts from San Francisco State University and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Theater Film and Television. Smith is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a 2022 Heinz Award; Guggenheim Fellowship; Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize; Ellsworth Kelly Award; The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts; and a Rauschenberg Residency. Smithʼs works have been featured in solo exhibitions at institutions such as Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX; and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, among others. Her work is included in many public collections, such as the Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Studio Museum Harlem; Smithsonian Museum of American Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Jeff Parker is a guitarist, multi-instrumentalist, producer and composer. A longtime member of the influential indie-band Tortoise, Parker is recognized as one of contemporary music’s most versatile and innovative electric guitarists and composers. With a prolific output characterized by musical ideas of angularity and logic, he works in a wide variety of mediums – from pop, rock and jazz to new music – using ideas informed by innovations and trends in both popular and experimental forms. He creates works that explore and exploit the contrary relationships between tradition and technology, improvisation and composition, and the familiar and the abstract. His sonic palette may employ techniques from sample-based technologies, analog and digital synthesis, and conventional and extended techniques from over four decades of exploring the intricacies of the electric guitar.
Also a prolific collaborator and composer, Parker has released several critically-acclaimed albums under his own name. His latest, “The Way Out Of Easy” (International Anthem/Nonesuch - 2024), premiered at number one on Billboard’s Contemporary Jazz Albums chart, and landed on numerous year-end “Best Of” lists.
An associate member of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement Of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1995, Parker was awarded the United States Artists’ Fellowship in 2022.
ABOUT CATCHING SIGHT
As part of Corita Art Center’s mission to initiate new forms and conversations inspired by our collections, Catching Sight explores photography’s role in Corita’s art and pedagogy through a series of lectures, programs, and exhibitions. Reflecting Corita’s collaborative spirit, we invite curators, writers, artists, and educators to creatively engage our extensive 35mm slide collection, offering fresh and diverse insights into her pioneering vision.
This presentation is organized by Corita Art Center’s senior curator, Olivian Cha, and made possible with special thanks to the Teiger Foundation.