UCR ARTS: California Museum of Photography is pleased to announce the first ever solo museum presentation of Lenard Smith. Smith is a Ghanaian-American studio-based photographer whose work often depicts still life tableaux. His photographs take inspiration from other artistic media including sculpture and architecture, in particular African Brutalist structures. The contents of his assemblages range from photographic equipment and theory, to found objects and detritus, to signifiers of Black identity and culture. Smith situates himself within the lineage of the “ragpicker” in his pursuit of creating unusual yet productive juxtapositions between found objects. Smith’s depiction of common objects is highly legible, personal, and interwoven with social identity. Employing a commercial aesthetic, his pictures simultaneously manifest in formalist estrangement from these otherwise familiar objects.

UCR ARTS presents selections from two bodies of work, “Fortuitous Encounter” (2018–20) and “Melancholy Objects” (2022). Both series titles refer to the work of critic Susan Sontag (1933–2004), whose writing on photography has been instrumental to the theorization of the medium.