On Dianne Smith
somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff begins the Lady in Green’s monologue. not my poems or a dance i gave up in the street / but somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff, she continues. Lady in Green is one of the seven characters — each known by the color they wear — in the late Ntozake Shange’s critically acclaimed choreopoem, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, that makes visible the acute blend of racism, sexism, and other forms of marginalization faced by Black women. for colored girls remains one of the most inventive works of American theater with its distinct blend of dance, music, and poetry, and Lady in Green, arguably, one of its most memorable protagonists. Her words, declarative and unflinching, indict a man who has come close to taking off with not the material possessions of the speaker, but the beauty and whimsy and pleasure of which Lady in Green understands herself to be in possession — her essence. The accusation is all the more revealing as the speaker comes to terms with this almost completed act of dispossession occurring in her presence. somebody almost run off with alla my stuff / & i waz standin there / lookin at myself / the whole time & it waznt a spirit took my stuff / waz a man whose ego walked round like Rodan’s shadow.
The “almost” is a crucial syntactic intervention on the part of Shange, as Lady in Green, ultimately, refuses to succumb to the violation. She asserts her healing and her fight to remain self-possessed in spite of the threat of such violence (and indeed this is a type of violence). hey man / this is not your perogative / i gotta have me in my pocket / to get round like a good woman shd / & make the poem in the pot or the chicken in the dance / what i got to do / i gotta have my stuff to do it to.
Such is the conceptual (dare I say spiritual?) matter that undergirded Dianne Smith’s 2020 multimedia installation, STUFF, honoring the pioneering literary artist. STUFF was monumental in scale, enveloping the lobby of Barnard College’s Milstein Center with brown butcher paper as seven green, wooden mannequin heads sat atop the installation — seers — while featuring three media works displayed on monitors as part of the sculptural form. The butcher paper itself is woven intricately such that the sculpture feels akin to a textile further imbued with life as a video of Smith’s recital of the Lady in Green’s monologue forms a chorus with the stories of other women who speak to the theme of reclamation found in Shange’s words. In this way, STUFF is not simply an homage to one Black woman who seemed a seer herself. Smith also designs a refuge for all women who have confronted the kleptomaniac workin hard & forgettin while stealin and survived.
STUFF also speaks to a critical aspect of Smith’s practice. Quite simply, she is compelled by stuff — an abundance of materials, objects, and items that comprise our everyday lives yet whose aesthetic purposes, to us laymen, appear far from obvious. In this way, Smith is a seer as well. Butcher paper recurs as the source material for works such From Pulp to Possibilities (2024), It’s Like A Jungle Sometimes (2023), and God’s Trombone (2020). That which should be discarded is resurrected anew. Though varied in conceit — the latter two works nod to the classic early hip hop track by Kurtis Blow and the revered poetic reimaginings of Black American sermons by James Weldon Johnson, respectively — Smith does not shy away from the imposing or the striking; it is as if the larger the work, the sharper her power is. With their blend of other materials such as staples, brightly colored fabrics, and rope, her sculptural forms reflect an encounter with the nuances of the African diaspora as it manifests in the United States while arguing for a serious engagement with the politics of sustainability. We should, then, consider Smith alongside artists such as Dominique Moody whose assemblages and site specific installations often make use of glass bottles, plastic, cardboard, metal, and twine or Chakaia Booker who has found an agile accomplice in rubber tires for her equally domineering (outdoor) sculptures.
And while her hand as a textile artist and weaver is evidenced in her larger sculptural forms, Smith’s technical acumen is on display clearly in her smaller works such as the basket forms exhibited at New York City’s Equity Gallery this fall. Weaving Legacies – Homage to the Women of the African Diaspora took the artist’s personal history as departure. Smith’s mother and aunts were weavers as they came of age in Belize, a practice that also allowed them to earn money for their families. Weaving Legacies acknowledges the labor of such artistry. Yet, Smith revises this tradition by using material such as aluminum, plastic tubing, and rope. A series of ten aluminum forms, Nodes, mounted on teak wood and hung linearly in the gallery function like offerings to Smith’s matriarchal lineage. Each node is distinct in shape, yet forms a spiritual whole. Inà Rere (Good Fire) (2017) is a red ribbon form that calls to mind a gourd, an aesthetic motif throughout the exhibition which further calls to mind, for this writer at least, the term given to the Big Dipper constellation by enslaved individuals in search of freedom in the United States. Smith, of course, is attuned to the specificities of her ancestral lineage as a Caribbean woman as it is situated within diaspora. For as many of the sculptures that are given titles in Standard American English, several more are given titles in Yoruba, like Inà Rere, or Creole. Smith insists on not just recasting weaving as a contemporary art form. She insists on making room for the logic of what the late Lorraine O’Grady termed “both/and.” That is, as O’Grady (another Black woman artist of Caribbean descent) argued, a tool that “enables a constant exchange between equals and sidesteps what I call ‘miscegenated thinking’ by eroding hierarchical oppo-sitions within racial, gender and class identity.”
Smith is uniquely versatile with a practice that also spans painting and photography, as creatively omnivorous as Shange, who also embraced a transgression across mediums, once was. And, as it is rooted in her aesthetic and biographical lexicon, the attention to conditions of sustainability operate across multiple registers. How might we repurpose objects and materials we sometimes love, sometimes do not think twice about, or are sometimes mistakenly unaware of their alternative uses? We know the urgency in this position as our earth calls us to be better stewards of our time here. But with an equal sense of vigilance, Smith refuses to flatten the sociopolitical rhizome that informs who she is in the world. Memory work as it is practiced through the artist’s cultivation of lineage — familial and otherwise — requires a commitment to return, to re-see. What happens when we are not afraid of the both/and? The intracies of subjectivity. Often, the world does not know what to make of Black women like this: daring in their reach, intellectually curious, firmly committed to Black people. But Smith, as Shange and O’Grady did, presses forward nonetheless with clarity, self-possessed, letting nothing go to waste.
JESSICA LYNNE
Jessica Lynne is a writer, editor, and art critic. She is a founding editor of ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Artforum, Frieze, The Los Angeles Times,The Nation, and Oxford American. Jessica is a recipient of a 2025 Rabkin Prize which celebrates the creative and intellectual contributions of visual arts writers. Her work has been supported by Art Omi, Tin House, and The Carolyn Moore Writers House. She has taught writing and lectured at institutions such as Colorado College, Northwestern University, The New School, and Yale School of Art, and was the host of the limited series podcast, Harlem is Everywhere.