Cauleen Smith, COVID MANIFESTO

In November 2020, one of America’s leading artists Cauleen Smith presented her ‘COVID MANIFESTO’ curated in collaboration with The Showroom, London on the Piccadilly Lights giant screen. Smith rewrote and revealed each point of the Manifesto throughout the duration of November. In a sort of ‘living’ still life, the artist’s desk became the tableau, in which personal items, remnants of daily rituals, and key references to her practice accumulated, appeared and disappeared. ‘COVID MANIFESTO‘ consisted of 23 pronouncements. The project unfolded in a sequence, a crescendo, that was punctuated by 7 intermissions selected from Smith’s existing works. Over the month, the personal and poetic, the eventful and now historical featured as Smith responded to COVID-19 and its multiple aftermaths.

Cauleen Smith is an American artist, filmmaker and writer whose work explores the intersections of experimental cinema, Black cultural histories, spirituality, science fiction and social justice. Working across film, installation, sculpture, performance and text, she creates immersive worlds that connect personal experience with collective transformation, offering new ways of imagining community, care and liberation.

Over the past three decades, Smith has developed a distinctive artistic language that combines rigorous research with poetic speculation. Her work frequently centres the lives, ideas and creative legacies of Black artists, musicians, activists and visionaries, constructing alternative narratives that challenge dominant histories while opening space for new futures. Moving fluidly between moving image, visual art and public space, she has become one of the most influential voices in contemporary American art.

In 2020, Smith collaborated with CIRCA and The Showroom, London on COVID MANIFESTO, one of the platform’s earliest public commissions. Broadcast daily on Piccadilly Lights throughout November, the project unfolded through a sequence of handwritten reflections composed during lockdown, transforming the artist’s desk into a living tableau of objects, ideas and daily observations. Presented at a moment when the pandemic was exposing profound social inequalities around the world, the commission offered an intimate yet collective meditation on justice, memory, survival and radical care. Alongside the public artwork, Smith released The Internet Is Not The Answer, a hand-printed edition produced in her Los Angeles studio.

Born in Riverside, California and based in Los Angeles, Smith’s work has been presented internationally at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, MASS MoCA, the Art Institute of Chicago, ICA Philadelphia and SFMOMA. The recipient of numerous awards, including the inaugural Ellsworth Kelly Award and the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, she continues to create works that expand the possibilities of art as a space for imagination, reflection and social change.