Conduct Your Blooming

Cauleen Smith has developed a lyrical visual practice across diverse media. She often proposes speculative narratives in her work, imagining new ways to embody and approach black identity that foster agency rather than oppression.

Smith produced her first group of hand-sewn banners in the summer of 2015. She populated them with the famous closing line from a Gwendolyn Brooks poem, “Conduct your blooming / in noise and the whip / of the whirlwind.” Smith and her friends and artist-peers mobilized them during the collectively organized Black Love Procession through Chicago’s Bronzeville in an effort to foster love and positivity. The words and symbols Smith features on her banners bear witness to issues of prejudice, racism, and people’s inability to understand one another.