Upcoming Events
C. Rose Smith, Untitled no. 90, Belmont Mansion, Nashville, TN, 2023, Gelatin Silver Print
Photo Credit: C. Rose Smith
October 8, 2025
5:30-7:30 p.m.
Join the Women’s Studies Research Center in celebrating the opening of C. Rose Smith: A Silent Rage. Meet the artist, explore their work, reflect with community members, and enjoy light refreshments.
C. Rose Smith: A Silent Rage brings together black-and-white photographs taken on location at Southern plantations and Northern textile mills. By inhabiting the preserved living spaces of enslavers, Smith inserts their body in scenes dominated by whiteness and predatory industry. As both maker and subject, Smith reclaims and memorializes the formerly enslaved.
Danielle Mckinney (b. 1981, Montgomery, AL), Secret Garden, 2021, Acrylic on canvas, 20 1/8 x 16 1/8 inches, Framed: 21 x 17 inches, Collection of Marianne Boesky
Photo Credit: Photo courtesy of the Rose Art Museum
October 9, 2025
12-2 p.m., Beginning in the Kniznick Gallery and concluding at the Rose Art Museum
Join us for an inspiring afternoon of art and exploration across Brandeis University! Begin your journey at the Kniznick Gallery with an artist-guided tour of C. Rose Smith: A Silent Rage. The exhibition brings together Smith’s arresting black-and-white photographs taken on location at Southern plantations and Northern textile mills, both sites complicit in the economy of slavery. By inhabiting the preserved living spaces of enslavers, Smith inserts their body in scenes dominated by whiteness and predatory industry. As both maker and subject, Smith reclaims and memorializes the formerly enslaved.
From there, we’ll walk together to the Rose Art Museum and discuss highlights from Danielle Mckinney: Tell Me More, an exhibition of sumptuous, meditative paintings that explore Black womanhood, illuminating resilience, beauty, and autonomy. Mckinney offers a bold and transformative vision of leisure, pleasure, and the rhythmic rituals of the everyday, viewed through a female gaze. Attendees will also have the opportunity to view the Rose’s other fall exhibitions, Fred Wilson: Reflections and Fabricated Imaginaries.
C. Rose Smith, Untitled no. 17, Pacific Mills, Lawrence, MA, 2022, Gelatin Silver Print
Photo Credit: C. Rose Smith
November 5, 2025
7 p.m. in the Liberman-Miller Lecture Hall, WSRC
Rose Smith will be joined in conversation by Dr. Nikki Greene to discuss C. Rose Smith: A Silent Rage and Smith’s practice at large.
NIKKI GREENE is a tenured professor of Art History at Wellesley College and an advisor to the ICA Boston for the 59th Venice Biennale presenting the work of Simone Leigh for the United States Pavilion in 2022. She has written for numerous art museums, including The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Guggenheim Museum, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery. Her forthcoming book Grime, Glitter, and Glass: The Body and The Sonic in Contemporary Black Art features María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s performances prominently.
ROSE SMITH is a visual artist examining the role of photography in constructing the layers of identity and individuality. Using fashion, site-specificity, and elements gleaned from studio portraiture, their photographs engender a subversive performance that gestures a critique of social norms. Born in Memphis, TN and raised in Atlanta, GA, Smith grew up learning the value of representation and record-keeping of images from watching their father take up the role of both photographer and videographer, and their two grandmothers assist in portrait studios.
Their work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at venues and festivals throughout the U.S. and Europe, including Autograph ABP (London, UK), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston, MA), FotoFest Biennial (Houston, TX), Tempe Centre for the Arts (Tempe, AZ), and PhotoBrussels (Brussels, Belgium), among others. Their work is held in the Wedge Collection and various private collections.
Smith earned an MFA in Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology and a BFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design. They are an Artist Scholar in Residence at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center, and currently serves as the Assistant Curator of Photography at Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis, TN. Smith is based between Memphis, TN and Providence, RI.
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