Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy
May 7–November 22, 2026
Cauleen Smith will be included in the 61st Venice Biennale, In Minor Keys, curated by Koyo Kouoh. Smith will present her installation The Wanda Coleman Songbook, first exhibited at 52W in 2024.
The Wanda Coleman Songbook is an immersive video installation that enlists scent, sight, and sound to explore the multidimensional depth of poems by Wanda Coleman (1946– 2013). Coleman was widely considered the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles, and her work guided Smith‘s reacquaintance with the city after a sixteen-year absence. At the heart of The Wanda Coleman Songbook listening room, visitors are invited to drop a needle on the eponymously titled, limited-edition two-color vinyl 12-inch EP with commissioned contributions by Kelsey Lu, Shala Miller, moor mother and Aquiles Navarro, Meshell Ndegeocello, Jeff Parker and Ruby Parker, Alice Smith, and Jamila Woods and Standing on the Corner.
Also called the “LA Blueswoman,” Coleman cultivated her fearless voice through the city‘s myriad cultural and political landscapes, as well as through initiatives like the Studio Watts Workshop and her experiences writing for television, editing, teaching, and performing. Invigorated by Coleman‘s intimacies with and revelations in the city, Smith familiarized herself deeply with the poet‘s oeuvre after returning to Los Angeles in 2017 and considered them alongside her own histories and feelings of rediscovery there Smith not only creates a cinematic environment translating Coleman‘s lyrical and adventurous verse but also a contemporary soundscape that captures the longing, tenderness, fury, and grief of the writer‘s poetry and prose, which so often revealed the unruly and untamed aspects of the major West Coast metropolis.
Cauleen Smith: The Wanda Coleman Songbook was curated by Ebony L. Haynes and presented by 52W, with special thanks to Wanda Coleman‘s brother George Evans.
Cauleen Smith was born in 1967 in Riverside, California. She received her BA, in 1991, from San Francisco State University, and her MFA, in 1998, from the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2007, she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, Maine. In 2020 the Whitney Museum of American Art presented Cauleen Smith: Mutualities, which marked the artist‘s first solo exhibition in New York and was presented in conjunction with the installation Cauleen Smith: Signals from Here on the High Line. In 2018, the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, organized the traveling exhibition Cauleen Smith: Give It or Leave It, which traveled to the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, in 2019, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in 2021. She has also been included in the Whitney Biennial (2017) and Yorkshire Sculpture International (2019).
Learn more at the Biennale Arte 2026.
