Fortuitous Encounters: A Conversation with Lenard Smith and Rebecca Morse
March 4, 2026 | 6:00 p.m.
Doors open at 5:30 p.m.
Artist Talk
Free ticketed admission
California Museum of Photography & Culver Center of the Arts
Event Info
Join us on the evening of March 4 to hear Lenard Smith in conversation with curator Rebecca Morse and exhibition curator Kathryn Poindexter-Akers about the intersections between commercial and fine art aesthetics in Smith’s work. Lenard Smith: Fortuitous Encounters at the California Museum of Photography is the first solo museum presentation of the work of Lenard Smith, a studio-based photographer whose work often depicts still life tableaux of assemblage sculptures, the contents of which range from photographic equipment and theory, to found objects and detritus, to signifiers of Black identity and culture.
Speakers:
Lenard Smith (b. 1975) is a first-generation Ghanaian-American artist and educator based in Los Angeles. He has published eight artist books, including Refuge (Perimeter Editions, 2024), and Melancholy Objects (Perimeter Editions, 2022). Smith’s work is in the collections of LACMA and Getty Research Institute, among others. He earned his MFA from Bard College and he was a MacDowell Fellow in 2024. Smith was a visiting assistant professor at UCR in 2023-25, and is currently art faculty at USC.
Rebecca Morse is Curator in the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Recent projects include Ed Ruscha: Now Then, Objects of Desire: Photography and the Language of Advertising, Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You I Mean Me I Mean You, among others. She was previously Associate Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). Upcoming projects include Laura Gilpin: Photographer of the West.
Kathryn Poindexter-Akers is Head of Exhibitions at UCR ARTS, where she has curated numerous exhibitions, including Shadow Archive: Meggan Gould (2025); Fictive Kin: Sarah Conaway, Annette Kelm, Kim Schoen (2017); and Aaron Siskind: Pleasures and Terrors (2015). Her writing has been published in Contemporary Art Reviews Los Angeles and elsewhere. Poindexter-Akers earned her MA in Art History at the University of Southern California (USC) and earned her BA in Studio Art from UC Irvine.
