Bayete Ross Smith: Mirrors, Taking Aim

4th floor gallery

Bayeté Ross Smith is an artist, photographer, and educator living in New York City. He began his career as a photojournalist with the Knight Ridder Newspaper Corporation.

Bayeté has exhibited internationally with organizations and venues such as the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Oakland Museum of California, MoMA P.S.1, the New Museum, Duetsche Bank, Rush Arts Gallery, the Leica Gallery, the Patricia Sweetow Gallery, the Goethe Institute (Ghana), and Zacheta National Gallery of Art (Poland). His collaborative projects "Along The Way" and "Question Bridge: Black Males" have shown at the 2008 and 2012 Sundance Film Festival, respectively. He has also been involved in a variety of community and public art projects with organizations such as the Jerome Foundation, Alternate Roots, The Laundromat Project, the City of San Francisco and the City of Atlanta. As an educator, he has worked with young people ranging from kindergarteners to college students. Bayeté’s accolades include a FSP/Jerome Fellowship, as well as fellowships and residencies from Berkeley to Barcelona. His photographs have been published widely.

Taking AIM

Taking AIM positions the photographic subject in the center of a target, and the viewer as passive voyeur or perpetrator. The artist thus renders uncomfortably blurry our cultural dichotomy between violence considered recreational, and that deemed deplorable or criminal..

From Hip Hop to action movies, to sports like boxing, mixed martial arts and football, popular culture is replete with blurry divides between recreational and deplorable violence. We also see it throughout history, in what wars, massacres and assassinations are considered just, and who is considered a tyrant. Finally it exists in the news and in current events, in terms of what types of violence gets reported andhow it is contextualized.

More Than Two, 2006

This piece features the artist himself positioned in a target. Drawn from Our Kind Of People, this reprised triptych asks that the viewer examine assumptions about identity as they question the relationship between condoned and deplorable or criminal violence.

Mirrors, 2010

This is an evolution of the Our Kind Of People project; in this series the multiple personae gaze at each other instead of the viewer. This new gaze questions the interaction the various personae that make up our selves have with one another, and questions the extent to which they are in harmony or in conflict