A striking installation of vintage, mostly black-and-white photographs by Ming Smith inaugurates the Nicola Vassel gallery, in Chelsea, revealing the artist’s seductive ability to incorporate painterly moments of near-abstraction into images as varied as celebrity portraits, street scenes, and landscapes. After graduating from Howard University, in 1973, Smith became the first female member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a New York collective of Black photographers, formed in 1963, that was recently the subject of a revelatory exhibition at the Whitney. Her work, though distinctive, reflects the group’s concern with Black representation—of both people and movements—and with formal invention in an era of cultural upheaval. A sublime image of Grace Jones at Studio 54, from the seventies, hinges not on the contrast of light and dark but, rather, on the textural differences among an array of blacks: the inky void at the composition’s center versus the glittering, glistening, and velvety shapes around it. In the starkly beautiful “Prelude to Middle Passage (Île de Gorée, Senegal),” from 1972 (seen above), figures in deep shadow frame a bright view of the ocean. “Evidence,” as the show is titled, is a very auspicious launch for this new gallery.
