Artwork Details
- Title
- Pilgrim
- Artist
- Date
- 2017
- Location
- Not on view
- Copyright
- © 2020, Cauleen Smith
- Credit Line
- Museum purchase made possible by the SJ Weiler Fund
- Mediums
- Mediums Description
- digital video, color, sound; 07:41 minutes
- Classifications
- Subjects
- Architecture Exterior
- Landscape
- Digital Catalogue
- Musical Thinking: New Video Art and Sonic Strategies
- Object Number
- 2020.54.2
Artwork Description
Smith's art and filmmaking has always been driven by histories of Black brilliance that resonate across time. Listening closely to the spiritual and musical philosophies of composer, performer, and swamini Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda (1937--2007) has inspired Smith's recent works. Smith's cinematic collages connect Coltrane's transformative visions to others who create spaces for liberation from the nineteenth century to the present.
In Pilgrim, Coltrane's experimental jazz piano unfurls as Smith's camera moves solemnly through the white ashram buildings and hillside setting of the Hindu community Coltrane founded in California. These scenes soon merge with the gothic spirals of Watts Towers, mid-twentieth-century folk sculptures in southern Los Angeles, before fading into a Shaker cemetery in upstate New York, where a pre--Civil War religious group lived the values of racial and gender equality.
Musical Thinking: New Video Art and Sonic Strategies, 2023
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