FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: CSN ARTSPACE GALLERY PRESENTS – Shawn Michelle Smith: Abstracting the View

 

CSN ARTSPACE GALLERY PRESENTS –

Shawn Michelle Smith: Abstracting the View

Friday, March 13, 2026, through Saturday, April 25, 2026

North Las Vegas Campus Artspace Gallery

The College of Southern Nevada, School of Arts & Letters, and Department of Fine Arts will host an exhibition of photo-based artwork that creates new forms from cast-off photographic materials as it explores widely ranging topics, both personal and cultural, by Illinois-based artists and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Professor of Visual and Critical Studies, Shawn Michelle Smith. Shawn Michelle Smith: Abstracting the View will open on Friday, March 13, 2026, and will run through Saturday, April 25, 2026, in the Artspace Gallery on the North Las Vegas Campus of the College of Southern Nevada.

Shawn Michelle Smith’s work as an artist, scholar, writer, and educator is focused on photography: what it is, what it means, and what it does. She is interested in the materiality of photographs and photographic technologies as well as their social functions. All of her work begins with looking closely at photographs, often attending to details at the edges of frames. Smith is an award-winning author who has published seven books, including most recently Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography (Duke University Press, 2020). Her scholarly work has been supported by fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, among others. She has exhibited her photo-based artwork in venues across the country.

Speaking of her work, Smith says, “My artwork is photo-based and ranges widely from the personal to the more broadly cultural. It is informed by my work as a writer, scholar, and educator, and explores questions about the nature of photography and its social function. I often begin with already existing photographs, and over the past few years, I have been using cast-off color snapshots as raw material to make new images.”

“Working with these remnants of analogue photography, I have cut out fragments from the prints and reassembled them in new forms. The new constellations put representation and abstraction into dynamic tension as images of grass and sky become color palettes and textures. Rather than pointing only to things in the world, the new images also point to the materiality of the photographs themselves — their paper substrates and glossy surfaces, their rich or fading colors, and their sheer number. The work is about photography, and made from photographs, but endeavors to create new forms and images from these materials.”

The CSN Artspace Gallery is free, family-friendly, and open to the public. Gallery hours are from 8 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday. The Artspace Gallery is upstairs above the main entrance lobby on the North Las Vegas campus, located at 3200 E. Cheyenne Avenue, one mile East of I-15 North.

 

For more information, please call (702) 651-4146
http://www.csn.edu/artgallery
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