The Center invited nationally recognized educator, administrator, funder, and curator Linda Earle to act as the Center’s 2021 Visiting Scholar, exploring how Black archives can serve as a framework for a multivalent exploration of Black cultural production. In this role, she spoke with filmmaker and visual artist Cauleen Smith about how archives inform her work. Below is an introduction from Earle, followed by their conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length. 

Cauleen’s work had been on my mind at the start of the project over a year ago. One of the last and certainly the most memorable exhibitions I saw just prior to lockdown in 2020 was Mutualities at the Whitney Museum, which featured her films Sojourners (2018) and Pilgrim (2017). The museum describes this body of work as being informed by “experimental film, non-Western cosmologies, poetry, and science fiction to create works that reflect on memory and Afro-diasporic histories.” Mutualities celebrated transmissions of Black cultural energy through time and space from an imaginary archive—music, physical sites, voices and gestures from artists, activists, footage of the horsemen of North Philly—as documents of resistance and possibility.

In an anteroom off the film installation space was her Firespitters series of drawings of the covers of books held in the author’s hand or the hands of those who had recommended them to the artist. Cauleen’s hand in the reproduction of the books reveals the depth of their influence on her in its attention and energy. I was struck by the generosity of both the creative and archival dimensions of the artist sharing documents of her intellectual and spiritual cosmology. The whole experience of this show stayed with me—both because of what crystallized and because of the questions it helped me form as I started my research.

I first met Cauleen in 2007 when she participated in the residency program at Skowhegan during my tenure there as executive director of programs. Among the subjects we touched on in our conversation below, recorded on June 15, 2021, was her engagement with Skowhegan’s archive of audio recordings of lectures by visiting and resident artists, which dated from 1954. The recordings and associated slides were made available for participants to listen to in their studios, and they mined it daily. The archives included a wide range of seminal Black artists—many of them absent from the curricula of my art education, and still unrepresented a generation later. They were a great source of knowledge for the whole community of artists.

For many young Black artists, the intimacy of hearing the voices of their elders as they worked in their own studios—Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, Martin Puryear, Emma Amos, and David Driskell among them—had a revelatory emotional dimension. Although these documents were certainly shaped to some extent by the institutional requirements of the lecture format, the contents were unmediated by editorial or curatorial intervention. The connection was direct. What Cauleen and others described was the generative potential of the archive not only for direct inspiration, but for locating artists in a lineage that liberates them. 

Cauleen and I also talked about the technical challenges of archiving her own film and video work. Archives are places of constant care and reassessment. So much of the innovative and restorative work being done in and with Black archives is imbued with the core intellectual and ethical principles of Black feminist praxis. A culture of fierce attention, care, collectivity, and joy attaches to and enlivens this conceptual framework. Everyone I spoke to for this project demonstrated a generous support of one another and of my learning that are very much part of that legacy.

—Linda Earle, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage 2021 Visiting Scholar

Linda Earle
Cauleen, I love your work so deeply because of the many planes of temporality you play with and because of your use of archives. I’ve been looking forward to having this conversation around film, because [film] has a special, complex relationship to archives as an archival medium. In particular, documentaries have a sort of archival authority even when they employ fictional devices. I’m thinking about [Robert J. Flaherty’s 1922 silent film] Nanook of the North, which, though largely staged for the cameras, is seen as an anthropological document, as well as an artwork.

Cauleen Smith
You know, it's funny that you mentioned Robert Flaherty’s work. I am reminded of going to the annual Flaherty Film Seminar for the first time ever, as one of the presenters in 2018. I’d never even been as a participant. Participating in the process was all new, and I had been oblivious to this ongoing conversation about Robert Flaherty in the seminar and the legacy around Nanook of the North—in particular among Indigenous artists. So I was very fortunate to be there at this moment, when the trouble of that film was being taken up and addressed by other participants. Mainly African American artists were screening, and the seminar was curated by Greg de Cuir Jr. and Kevin Jerome Everson. They’re great. And there was also a critical mass of Indigenous filmmakers participating. The logo for the seminar used to be an iconic silhouette of Nanook, and they said, “You know, that's got to go.” I didn't realize the attachment that the founders or the board—the keepers of this organization—had to that iconography. I’d always been suspicious of the mythology around the film as a model for documentary cinema. But this organization’s insistence on retaining imagery that felt injurious or exploitative to Indigenous folks was a new conversation for me. And I guess that says a lot about the way films are taught and discussed in institutions. I'd always thought of Nanook of the North as an experimental narrative film. I thought it was a way to make a movie with other people.

Earle
But there’s a perception of documentary “truth”—

Smith
—because of the anthropological practices and principles built into documentary filmmaking. I instinctively kind of flinch at the idea of “truth” or “fact” in film simply because of the nature of the cinematic gaze and knowing how that’s constructed. And here were a group of supremely talented artists saying that they’d long ago reached their limit of tolerating this hegemonic impulse to picture their folk in this way.

I was just really excited to be in the midst of this controversy and this recognition on the part of the organization that things had to change. This was not the first time Indigenous filmmakers had asked them to get rid of this logo—it was like maybe the third or fourth confrontation—but this time it was succeeding. It was exciting to feel that the way in which Nanook of the North and Robert Flaherty—and all of his work that has been used as this template for how to record human culture and behavior—was being shattered and questioned. We were watching a Flaherty film almost every night, picked by Greg and Kevin. They were very shrewd about their selections.

When you stop looking at them as “documentaries,” they become much more fascinating films, you know what I mean? Once you understand that he's actually giving the people in front of the camera agency to create something, even his stature as a filmmaker shifted a little bit for me. Because whether he was willing to speak of it or not, his willingness to fabricate and collaborate with the people he was filming seems generous to me.

Calling it a “documentary” is a problem. Him claiming authorship is a problem. But the processes that he used to make it—like, you know that scene where they're piling out of the canoe, like clowns coming out of a Volkswagen? That scene is just funny, and the people in the film are all in on the joke. To me, that's fabulous. The problem is the continued misreading of that scene: the notion that the people in the film are, in fact, guileless clowns. This is what white supremacy injects into perception: the presumption of pathology. And cinema has been that project’s number one tool. To call it a documentary dissembles. It's important to know that they're making this joke together.

I don't know if I answered your question about the archives. But I was just thinking about misuse—or even just restaging—in regard to some of the sources that I use. I still struggle with that in the film Sojourner that I made. For example, the way people want to talk about the Watts Towers, which appear in the film, is really interesting. It’s this really fraught history. There’s an art historical history, there's a community, neighborhood history; there's a Black history, and an LA city parks history. And they do not really mesh very well. Some art histories refer to Watts Towers as “Nuestro Pueblo,” because [Watts Towers artist] Sabato Rodia imprinted that phrase into the mosaics on the walls of the towers. And that was the name of the site submitted by a curator for a wall text for one of my shows. And I rejected that, because whether or not that's what it was called, nobody in LA, in that community, calls it that. So let's not. It’s an attempt to have art history take this object that's really grounded now in a community and decontextualize it by saying, “Rodia was Italian, he wrote this on the tower, and therefore that is the name we shall henceforth use in our preservation of this object.” That is kind of appalling. I went down into the hundreds of LA [South-Central Los Angeles, where the Watts Towers are located] and asked someone to direct me to Nuestro Pueblo, and they had no idea what I was talking about. So it’s this really tactical use of language and history to take things—to claim things.

Earle
And it's an issue in archives, in terms of language and finding aids and all of the instruments used to search.

I'm wondering about how institutional archives are often approached as if they are inherently authoritative and about what you said about how you're negotiating the layers of information and history that you're presenting in your art. What are the ethics and responsibilities and your own feelings about that?

Smith
As you were speaking, I was thinking about the Octavia Butler archives at the Huntington Libraries, which I had the great privilege of having access to for a summer. Wow! I mean, the first week of going through her papers, I was barely able to do it. I've never really had this experience of holding something like a notepad that she wrote on and just being overwhelmed by the kind of the capacity of this woman—her mind and what she generated with it. And I’m there holding her notepad! I would literally start weeping and have to walk through the gardens to get myself together. So I wasted a whole week, just crying in the Huntington Gardens because I was so awestruck by the contact I was able to have with this woman and her work and her mind. I suspect that for most African American scholars, using the archives means engaging with the lives of our oppressors. We must follow a trail of crumbs to find evidence of ourselves through the lens of the insurance company or the auctioneer or the plantation mistress. Whatever was useful to them constitutes the knowledge we are able to glean of ourselves. The experience of poring over the papers of someone like me who is thinking of someone like me and cares about me was completely novel and strange. And I thought this may be, in a way, a dangerous place.

Earle
Why dangerous?

Smith
Because I feel such an affinity with her. There were all these moments of projection and assumption, of me thinking I knew something about her that I couldn't know based on what was there. And I've noticed, in the way that her archive is used, that I see this happening a lot. People say things about her life—her private life—which is not very much in evidence in this archive. I think her family very shrewdly sliced that out. And so there are all kinds of presumptions made—speculations about her and misunderstandings.

Then one day I realized that everything in that archive is actually 100 percent in her books. That was this weird epiphany for me. For instance, there is something astounding about the way she journals a rant about Bush and then synthesizes that into the political backdrop of a story about a girl walking up the 5 freeway [in Parable of the Sower]. There was something so shrewd about the way that her archive had been manicured, but I found it difficult to learn something about her public and social and creative mind that wasn’t already in the books. The only things that really held my attention were in the margins, while she's writing about [Parable of the Sower protagonist] Lauren Olamina and thinking of that body of work as a trilogy. In the margins there might be a note that says, “Go buy lipstick,” and a little shopping list. Then later, you would see, because the notebooks are so chronological, that she had to do a book signing. She’s buying lipstick because she knows she has this book signing coming up. That kind of stuff became so exciting, because I didn't have to speculate. I didn't have to wonder. I didn't have to say, “Oh, she lived a lonely life of solitude.” There's no evidence of loneliness in her archives. She is so busy, she doesn't mention anybody. She doesn't even mention her family. Not even her closest aunt, whom she apparently spoke to every day. I thought “Oh, this is so dangerous—having this opportunity to be in an archive of someone like me who thinks of me and who cares about me, as opposed to my oppressor.” You can see how histories become distortions that inscribe our own desires onto the lives we claim to investigate. I was supposed to make a project about what I found in the archives, and the thing that was of interest to me was this unpublished book of baby names! She researched all the names of all her characters in depth, so she made a book of that research. I wrote her agent and was like, “Are you kidding me? When are you publishing this? Everybody in the whole world wants this book!” I just want to go around naming babies right now!

Earle
This brings up so much about the difference in mindset and critique when you're engaging archives that you know you're going to struggle with. When you find yourself looking at material in a world of information that is more aligned with your identity, maybe some of that criticality retreats. You also monitor yourself in a different way. What did you learn about the archival process, from your point of view as an artist?

Smith
I did meet briefly with the woman who made the finding aids and did all of that. She was really helpful. She talked about the struggles of doing this work of unpacking a notebook and all the receipts shoved in the papers, which they take out of the notebooks, and they put it in another folder. All the notebooks are together, and all the ephemera is somewhere else, and you have to know to look for it.

I think it was Brent Edwards who told me about looking at Duke Ellington's Bible—the picture of Billy Strayhorn that he used as a bookmark. In the archive, those items are separated, so if you were looking at his Bible, you would have to scour the ending aid to know about Strayhorn’s photo. But I want to know exactly on what page that photograph was, you know?

To me, they should be together. The action—even if it's a receipt from the 7-Eleven that you cram into a book to mark a page—speaks to a relation between a scholastic/creative life and a mundane life and how they collide. I guess this is the stuff I want to know as an artist. I think archives are designed around a kind of linearity that is not terribly useful to me. Art, I think, can do things that history as a discipline cannot do.

Earle
As a creative act and also an intellectual act, as you've described, it is in search of a larger, deeper truth. And it seems to me that Black artists have a particular affinity for that process because of that struggle to find the truth. Resistance.

Smith
I was talking to a curator about this and how African Americans argue about what is “culture.” Because “culture” is this sort of academic/anthropological word, and it’s sometimes used against us and sometimes entraps and exploits us. But Black people in captivity in North America, we are a totally new people. We just didn't exist until 500 years ago. I’ve been thinking about that in terms of the archive and in terms of what can be known. How do people make themselves from scratch? Because of abolition laws, the importation of Africans practically ceased for North America much earlier than it did for South America and the Caribbean, right? Memory becomes material; invention becomes ritual. Yes, we brought all kinds of things from the continent with us, but they didn't remain intact. The urgency of survival—the willful determination to insist upon our own humanity—meant that we turned what we had into new ceremony, a new ritual, something else completely. Thinking of the Black archive in this way is almost like looking at very beginnings—almost like a proto-human—the beginnings of a people in the process of making themselves human in the face of not being considered human at all. That we did that, I think, is astounding. I know that this is not a new idea, but I am thinking about it in the most literal, material terms. What does that mean, to insist on the fact that we had to actually make ourselves into people because that was denied us? Because there was no social space for that project in this country? How do you find the evidence of that?

Earle
Yes, because finding the evidence of the kind of richness and invention that you're describing is so much more complex than, say, the phase in the narrative of Black self-recovery of, “We are all descended from kings and queens,” which I always thought is a really reductive, impoverished way of thinking about the past, so lacking in nuance and invention and the kind of energy that you just described.

Before we started recording, we were talking about how we protect our stories a little bit, and that's been one of the causes of the gaps we encounter in archives, in addition to institutional redaction. So I wanted to ask about your own family’s—and your own—sense of your archives as an artist

Smith
My father instigated reunions for his family in Tennessee and Georgia. And he and my mother have done a great deal of work around genealogy and trying to trace things back as far as they can, which for me is a little bit chilling. Because there's a point at which it stops. So my dad doesn't even really know his grandfather, who he was or where he was from. It just cannot be known. It cannot be known.

There's also this push towards respectability, like a “Black Christian ascendancy” we are all very committed to. I don't criticize that aspiration, but I do love that my grandfather was a pool shark, and he spent every summer trying to teach me how to play pool. I never knew why! But in fact, playing pool was his trade. I learned that well into adulthood. I wish I’d known that a bit earlier. I wish it was something my family could talk about.

Earle
Yes, a lot of erasure in my family, too, in return for “respectability.”

Smith
I'm hopeful that, in this new century, we will be recuperating these parts of ourselves with an understanding that we do not need to perform a kind of colonial subjecthood. We can now embrace our everyday living: the things we do to live, to survive, and just to be. I think my grandfather played pool because he was good at it, and he made some money, and he enjoyed it.

Earle
Imagine engaging joy in the archives and not only a history of abuse. Because there always was some joy. It’s a form of resistance: the counter-story.

I’m going to change the subject to get back, for a moment, to film. At the beginning, film was on nitrocellulose stock, an incredibly unstable medium, more than half of which has since disappeared. Burned up. The subsequent film-recording media are safer physically, but the archival standards shift and are now digital. Do you think of this with your own work? You used to shoot on film.

Smith
I still do sometimes. The flexibility and freedom of digital is wonderful. But I trust it so much less. Have you ever had the file crash, and someone annoyingly asks you if you backed it up? “No, I didn’t! I was too busy editing!” You know? Film is unstable, yes. But digital? Is it even real? (Laughs)

I have hard drives sitting around with all this early material. I don't know what's on them. I don't even know if they'll turn on anymore. That stuff could just be gone! Whereas my negatives that I shot 25 years ago, they may be corroded, but they’re viewable. When digital was ascending, there was always this sort of argument with hardcore film people about the purity of cinema. But as someone who struggled through film school just trying to get my film done—trying to find the money to get my film out of the lab—I don't have any romantic attachment to the medium other than what it does aesthetically as a material. I don't think of it as supreme. In a way, I felt like film labs were these crazy gatekeepers and that my film was always in purgatory. I was literally borrowing from friends, as we waited for financial aid checks.

Earle
So expensive! But at that point, digital imagery didn’t look as good as it does now, in terms of quality of the image.

Smith
Yeah, but I still battle with digital technology, because I still think the algorithms of how it sees are not being designed to see dark people. I think about that all the time.

Earle
Just like the way the chemistry of color film was developed around white skin tones.

So how do you manage accessing your work that was made on different recording media from different periods—the film and analog video to digital?

Smith
Truthfully, there is stuff that I just do not access. There are early videos that I made that only exist because I accidentally left a tape with some organization or some programmer, and they held on to it! I have masters that are on quarter-inch tape or SuperBeta—whatever was the medium du jour. I don’t even know where to go to get that stuff digitized, and I am not sure digitizing it would really be an act of preservation. Hard drives die. I don’t think they even make a Mac dongle for some of the drives I used in the aughts.

I'm very fortunate that a lot of my films got adopted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Mark Toscano was the archivist there. He's remarkable. He's just going around the country finding experimental filmmakers and saying, “Can I have your stuff? Where is it?” and, “Will you go find it? I know it's probably under your bed, in your closet, in your basement. Can we come and have someone pick it up? We'll take care of it.” He’s reprinted some of my work. It looks better than it ever looked when I made it, because he has the time to sit down with the colorist. Whereas I, because of the expense, would just make notes to pass to the colorist, and that’s it. Mark sits down with them, does a pass, then gives it to me to do a pass. And then they make a print. I've never seen some of my films look better.

Earle
So great that you’re part of the archival process. Is it transferred?

Smith
He does prints. He does digital masters, but masters are less of his concern. He’s very interested in preserving the celluloid. The masters are kind of like an extra. Sometimes I'm paying for one to be digitized, because it's not a priority. He has to find money. He's busy rescuing film. He’ll get it done for you, but you know, this is the cost. I just think it is a phenomenal thing that this archive exists.