Clarion Vol 10: Cauleen Smith: The Wanda Coleman Songbook

The Wanda Coleman Songbook, 52 Walker’s tenth exhibition featuring the work of Cauleen Smith, is an ode to Los Angeles and its unofficial poet laureate, Wanda Coleman (1946–2013).

Smith transforms Coleman's enduring oeuvre into an immersive, multisensorial experience, both a cinematic landscape and a profound soundscape featuring interpretations of Coleman's poems by celebrated artists Kelsey Lu, Shala Miller, Moor Mother, Aquiles Navarro, Meshell Ndegeocello, Jeff Parker, Ruby Parker, Alice Smith, Jamila Woods, and Standing on the Corner.

With a curator’s note by Ebony L. Haynes, this volume of Clarion features critical texts by Roxane Gay, Cassie da Costa, and Bingham Bryant, alongside reflections from artists Moor Mother, Shala Miller, Aquiles Navarro, and Meshell Ndegeocello.. Gay ponders the contradictions of Los Angeles, “both paradise and paradise lost.” Costa reflects on the multiple slippery relationships between poem and song, film and image that Coleman and Smith engage in. Bryant analyzes Smith’s use of color, which resists conventional symbolic meaning to destabilize reality and complicate perceptions of her characters’ subjectivities.

The volume also includes conversations between Wanda Coleman and Charles Joseph, as well as between Cauleen Smith and Ebony L. Haynes. Coleman and Joseph delve into the poet’s core mission to “rehumanize the dehumanized” amid constant, morphing racist forces in the city; Smith and Haynes discuss the myriad collaborations that resulted in a collective homage in celebration of Coleman and the terrible beauty that is Los Angeles.