Frames of Reference

Cauleen Smith is an artist who makes films, installations, and objects. She actively invites engagement, and with much of the work she employs a purposeful undermining of image and language to elicit contemplation. Smith’s films create worlds that expand on the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental filmmaking. Drawing from structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction, she assembles poetic compositions that gently reveal nuanced narratives, both familiar, and oftentimes, purposefully opaque. Her text-based tapestries follow a historic tradition of heraldry. These banners, which can be understood as a social device symbolizing community organizing, declare personalized idioms sewn in script that simulates her own handwriting, lifted directly from her sketchbook. Through her installations, Smith constructs archetypes of the universe and she assembles miniature worlds using myriad items, which often include mundane object and figurines alongside symbols of colonialism, such as porcelain objects and potted plants, paired with disco balls, rocks and minerals, resulting in something otherworldly and also museological. For Smith, consideration of the audience is an important element of her process, and she uses a full range of media and references to express her belief in utopian potentiality.

Associate Dean for Social Sciences and Edward Stettinius Professor of History at the University of Virginia, Claudrena N. Harold specializes in African American history, Black cultural politics, and labor history. 

The collaboration with UVA colleague Kevin Jerome Everson on two short films, Sugarcoated Arsenic (2013) and Foosball: U. of Virginia Charlottesville, 1976 (2013) as part of the multimedia project Black Fire, supported by an Arts in Action grant were her debut film credits as co-director, writer and producer. Subsequent films reflecting Harold’s ongoing research into the history of Black student activism at UVA include We Demand (2016), Fastest Man in the State (2017), How Can I Ever Be Late (2017) Black Bus Stop (2019), Pride (2021) and Accidental Athlete (2023). These films have screened at numerous international film festivals and art institutions, including Chicago International Film Festival, Black Star, Berlinale, New York Film Festival,  IFFR, EMAF, IKFF Hamburg, Cinema du Reel, Doc Lisboa, BFI/London, Edinburgh, Porto Post Doc, Indie Memphis, AFI Fest, Crossroads Festival, Fronteira Festival Brazil, and have been featured at the Whitney Biennial, Harvard Film Archive, the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.,  Austrian Film Museum, mumok, Vienna, and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea. 

Claudrena is the author of The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South, 1918-1942 (2007), which chronicles the history of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association from the perspective of black women and men living below the Mason-Dixon Line; New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South (2013) which details how the development of New Negro politics and thought was shaped by people, ideas, organizations, and movements rooted in the South, bringing into full view the ways southern blacks not only validated the idea of the New Negro as a national phenomenon but also significantly informed and reshaped the contours of black nationality and class formation; and When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras (2020), an exploration into gospel music’s essential place as an outlet for African Americans to express their spiritual and cultural selves. She is the co-editor, with Louis Nelson of Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity (2018). 

Kevin Jerome Everson is the Commonwealth and Ruffin Foundation Distinguished Professor of Studio Art and director of studio arts at the University of Virginia. Recipient of the Guggenheim, Heinz Award in Art and Humanities, Berlin Prize, Alpert Award for Film/Video, Rome Prize, Everson’s art practice encompasses photography, printmaking, sculpture and film, 12 award-winning features and over 250 solo and collaborative short form works that screen regularly at international film festivals, cinemas, galleries, museums and art biennials. 

Everson’s work has been the subject of retrospectives and solo exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern/Film, London, Highline, NYC, Cinema du Reel/Centre Pompidou, Paris, Art Windsor- Essex, Windsor, Canada (in association with Media City Film Festival), Andrew Kreps Gallery, NYC, Halle fur Kunst Steiermark, Graz, Austria, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art,  Seoul, Glasgow Shorts, Cinematek Brussels, Cork International Film Festival, Visions du Reel, Nyon, and the Harvard Film Archive . His films have been featured at the Whitney Biennial (2008, 2012, 2017), the 2013 Sharjah Biennial, the 2018 Carnegie International, the 2023 Contour Biennale, Mechelen, Belgium and the 2024 Thailand Biennale.  

Everson’s award-winning films regularly screen at international film festivals including Black Star,  Sundance, IFFR, Berlinale, Cinema du Reel, EMAF, Courtisane, Locarno, BlackStar, Venice, Toronto, New York Film Festival, BFI/London, Doc Lisboa, True/False, Crossroads, Media City, AFI Fest,  Chicago International Film Festival, BAFICI ,Jeonju, DMZ Docs, cinemas, galleries, museums and public and private art institutions, including  Whitechapel, London, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, Museum of Modern Art, NY, Reina Sofia, Madrid, LUMA Foundation, Switzerland, National Museum of African American History, Washington, D.C., MOCA, L.A., Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and REDCAT, Los Angeles. 

A3 DVD Boxed Set, Broad Daylight and Other Times, was released by Video Data Bank (U.S.) in 2011 and a DVD dedicated to films focusing on the rituals and gestures of labor, I Really Hear That: Quality Control and Other Works was released by VDB in 2017. The two disc blu-ray How You Live Your Story: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson, was released by the UK based boutique label Second Run DVD in Fall 2020 and Second Run’s special blu-ray edition release of Everson’s eight hour factory film, Park Lanes was released in February 2025, featuring a booklet with essay/interview contributions from Michael B. Gillespie, Matthew Barrington and Elena Gorfinkel. 

Everson has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, NEA, NEH, Ohio Arts Council, and the Virginia Museum, grants and commissions from Just Films/Ford Foundation, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Creative Capital and the Sundance Institute, residencies at Mobile Frames/Media City (Windsor/Detroit), Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Yaddo and MacDowell Colony, and numerous university fellowships.

Ephraim Asili is an African American artist, filmmaker, DJ, and traveler whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. His childhood and adolescence were imbued with hip-hop music, Hollywood movies, and television. Often inspired by his day-to-day wanderings, Asili creates art that situates itself as a series of meditations of the everyday. He received his B.A. in film and media arts from Temple University and his M.F.A. in film and interdisciplinary art at Bard College. Asili is currently the director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard College, where he is also an associate professor teaching film production and film studies.

Asili’s films have screened at festivals and venues all over the world, including the New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, the Berlinale, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Program 1: Wednesday, Feb. 18, 6 p.m.
Program 2: Thursday, Feb. 19, 6 p.m. 

Program 1: Wednesday, Mar. 18, 6 p.m.
Program 2: Thursday, Mar. 19, 6 p.m.