Bayeté Ross Smith, 2019 Presidential Leadership Scholar, artist, and adjunct instructor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, discusses his passion for creating impactful art and the lessons he learned in the Presidential Leadership Scholars Program.
Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your personal leadership project.
I am a multidisciplinary visual artist and visual journalist. I began my career as a photojournalist with several of the Knight-Ridder newspapers. However, nowadays, we use the term visual journalist because people like me work in still photography, video, immersive media (virtual reality, augmented reality, extended reality), and multimedia to tell our stories.
I was born in Massachusetts, raised in New York City, and attended a historically Black university. I work at the intersection of fine art, visual journalism, and public art installations. My work is in multiple museum and institutional collections. I have created journalistic work for numerous press publications. My work has also been officially selected for the Sundance Film Festival, LA Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, and Sheffield DocFest. I have created exhibits, installations, and programs in the United States and internationally in Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America.
My leadership project involves using my artistic and journalistic work as the basis for installations and corresponding programs within the legal community, primarily law schools and law firms, that use images and stories to question the subjective frameworks through which we create and interpret laws and policies. I create installations in the hallways and working spaces of law schools and law firms so that lawyers and legal scholars live with these images for an ongoing period and reflect on their meaning.
The installations consist of my work and sometimes the work of artistic colleagues. These installations have a corresponding curriculum and series of workshops that provoke reflection and analysis of various social and legal issues. They range from our societal relationship to violence, perception based on appearance, perception based on nationality, and the role someone’s country of citizenship plays in their ability to move freely around the world and gain access to specific resources, as well as examining untold and obscured histories and how they directly impacted law and policy in our current times.
This project is ongoing; however, some of its highlights include my being appointed the inaugural Artist-In-Residence at Columbia Law School for two years and a series of remote courses I taught in the St. Thomas College of Law’s Intercultural Human Rights Program. I also created an installation with Goodwin Proctor LLP, featured in 12 of their offices internationally across North America, Europe, and Asia.
My goal is to continue to conduct this program, which I have tentatively titled the Art of Justice at more institutions of law in a more extensive way. I am particularly interested in engaging with legal institutions and policymaking institutions simultaneously.
Which lessons learned during the Presidential Leadership Scholars program have stayed with you the most, and how have you put them into action?
Since I completed the program, several lessons from PLS have stayed with me. The most useful lessons while finishing my latest series of projects were the ones about vision and communication and strategic partnerships. The vision and communication lessons were critically important. I worked with teams of people in multiple countries and continents simultaneously to produce overlapping public art and journalistic installations, with corresponding programs, in museums and public spaces.
Since I had to communicate effectively across cultures, languages, and time zones, creating connections based on core values and shared narratives became critical, as I embedded these into the presentation and design of each installation and into the programming we developed for each location.
Another element of effectively completing my recent work involved the creation of strategic partnerships in Benin, France, Spain, and the U.S. Finding the correct stakeholders who shared my values and motivation was necessary. I also had to constantly manage these partnerships to ensure that they were evolving in a way that continued to create shared value and mutual benefits for my colleagues and then, ultimately, our audiences.
You recently launched a retrospective exhibit in multiple cities in France which invites viewers to consider how prejudices shape perceptions of individual identities. What inspired this project, and what do you hope viewers experience as they attend the exhibit?
My first solo European retrospective, Au-delà des apparences, examines visual representation, its history, and how that history directly affects our current perceptions and events worldwide. Quite often, the representation of other people and communities is reduced to a few simple reductive formulas. This inhibits our ability to imagine what is truly possible and engage with each other individually and in groups in the most productive ways.
I create a series of artistic and journalistic experiences in a complete museum installation – taking the form of images, videos, immersive VR, and archival documents – that force us to question our way of analyzing and interpreting the world around us, our preexisting beliefs, and where those beliefs come from. I draw direct connections to history and visual memory, which all come together to affect how we create and interpret laws, policies, and various social systems.
This work was inspired by my experience attending a historically Black college and my early work as a photojournalist, where I realized that people represent themselves as different aspects of their personalities in different environments. Furthermore, the fact that we all have a different way of seeing and how we “see” the world impacts how we perceive, analyze, and interpret the same information.
The concept of what is excluded from the frame or framework being as important as what is included became very apparent to me during my work in newsrooms and seeing how different members of the press of different generations, economic classes, religions, and ethnic backgrounds could all interpret the same information differently and therefore emphasize different details. At the HBCU I attended, Florida A&M, we often had to “code switch” to navigate different circumstances in our professional development training. I became very aware that people are multiple things simultaneously and, by extension, circumstances and narratives often have multiple truths embedded in them.
This is done in a context that provokes the audience to reflect on what types of ideas and assumptions immediately come to mind when they experience the artwork and where those ideas come from. The exhibition aims to push us to question how we know and what we know and reflect on how our identity and cultural background affect our perceptions of people and events.
Societies and individuals often rely on stereotypes to simplify reality for the sake of convenience. However, this is very dangerous and can lead to a misleading and limited understanding of our fellow members of society. These misunderstandings can direly affect how our society functions, especially in law, policy, and diplomacy.
I hope the audience is entertained and informed by the historical narratives in the exhibition and see the connection to how identity, history, and visual memory impact how we all analyze and interpret the same information. I want them to have a personal internal experience that leads to discovering how they subscribe to certain biases, stereotypes, and misconceptions without realizing it and how that affects how they engage with their fellow humans. But I don’t want people to feel shame; I hope they will feel enlightened and empowered by this personal discovery and hopefully reflect on how it applies to their lives and professions.
After the completion of your exhibit in France, what future plans do you have for this exhibit?
I plan to have this retrospective travel to multiple locations throughout Europe, North America, Africa, and South America and engage with a broad range of communities in the Francophile and Anglophile world. As I mentioned, the installation has accompanying programs, workshops, and games that can engage audiences in public, institutional, and educational spaces.
This exhibit and its programming not only spread awareness but also bring people together to share their perspectives and ideas for solutions to some of society’s most pressing challenges.
I am also working on a series of sculptures in multiple countries in North America, Europe, Africa, and South America. They will be constructed out of sugarcane, cotton, and tobacco and simultaneously exist in multiple locations. These sculptures will broadcast a soundtrack that consists of local people’s favorite music and historians discussing the history of the sugar, cotton, and tobacco industries and how the economic policies and laws that originated from those industries still affect global economic policy today and impact different communities in different ways in different regions. I have already created sculptures in Paris, France; Ouidah, Benin; Harlem, New York; Montgomery, Alabama; and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
