In honor of the current exhibition, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith, please join us for a symposium of screenings and public conversations that will shed light on Harry Smith’s singular body of work and explore the broader cultural and historical contexts of his practice. The exhibition will be on view on Levels 1 and 3. This program is co-presented by the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and the Harvard Film Archive.  

Participants include: 

Dorothy Berry, Digital Curator for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture; Dan Byers, John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts; Philip Deloria, Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University; Haden Guest, Director of the Harvard Film Archive; Sky Hopinka, Assistant Professor of film in the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University; Kelly Long, Senior Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Greil Marcus, American author, music journalist and cultural critic; Rani Singh, Director of the Harry Smith Archives; P. Adams Sitney, film theorist and historian of European and American avant-garde film; and Elisabeth Sussman, Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Co-Curator and Exhibition designer Carol Bove will present an artist talk the previous evening, Thursday, September 26, before a public reception.

The symposium will take place:

1:00–6:00 pm, Carpenter Center, Lower Level Theater

Free and open to the public  

Seating in the Carpenter Center is limited, and will be accommodated on a first come, first serve basis.

Please email: [email protected] with any questions about accessing the theater. 

Register here and be the first to learn about our upcoming Harry Smith publication  (registration not required, but highly encouraged)

1:00 

Welcome 
Dan Byers, John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts 
Screening: Film No. 16: (Oz: —The Tin Woodman’s Dream), c. 1968. 35mm film transferred to digital video (15 min)  

1:30 

Curating Harry Smith 
Exhibition co-curators Dan Byers, Kelly Long, Rani Singh, and Elisabeth Sussman discuss the art historical, curatorial, ethical, archival, and technical considerations of curating Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith.  

2:45 

Screening: Film No. 15 (Study of Seminole patchwork patterns), c. 1965. 16mm film transferred to digital video, color, silent (7 min) 

Harry Smith: Collector, Anthropologist, Artist 
Dorothy Berry, Philip Deloria, Sky Hopinka, and Greil Marcus discuss Harry Smith’s work with collecting, recording, anthologizing, and the discipline of anthropology, including his engagement with Native American communities and his creation of the Anthology of American Folk Music. 

Break 

4:30  

Screening: Film 11 (Mirror Animations), c. 1957. 16mm film transferred to digital video, color, sound (4 min)

Presentation by film scholar P. Adams Sitney followed by a conversation with Haden Guest.  

6:00 

End of program  

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith is on view through December 1, 2024.  

The exhibition catalog will be available in November.  

Dorothy Berry is the Digital Curator for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. With a background in archival science and ethnomusicology, she has become a leading figure in Black archival theory and practice, as well as a published author on topics around Black cultural heritage. Her writings can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Maggot Brain, Public Domain Review, Lapham's Quarterly and various academic publications. She is currently working on a book of essays focusing on memory, archives, and Black life. 

Dan Byers is a curator of contemporary art with a current focus on commissioning new work with living artists. In addition to leading the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, he teaches curatorial studies in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies (AFVS). His projects at the Carpenter Center include exhibitions with Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Pope.L, Morgan Bassichis, B. Ingrid Olson, Candice Lin, Deidrick Brackens and Katherine Bradford, Tony Cokes, Jonathan Berger, Anna Oppermann, Liz Magor, and Renée Green. Previously, he was Mannion Family Senior Curator at the ICA/Boston and Richard Armstrong Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Carnegie Museum of Art and co-curator, with Daniel Baumann and Tina Kukielski, of the 2013 Carnegie International. Byers was Curator of the Icelandic Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, featuring artist Hildigunur Birgisdottir.

Philip J. Deloria is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, where his research and teaching focus on the social, cultural and political histories of the relations among American Indian peoples and the United States, as well as the comparative and connective histories of indigenous peoples in a global context. His first book, Playing Indian (1998), traced the tradition of white “Indian play” from the Boston Tea Party to the New Age movement, while his 2004 book Indians in Unexpected Places examined the ideologies surrounding Indian people in the early twentieth century and the ways Native Americans challenged them through sports, travel, automobility, and film and musical performance. Deloria received the Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1994, taught for six years at the University of Colorado, and then at the University of Michigan from 2001 to 2017, before joining the faculty at Harvard in January 2018. 

Haden Guest is Director of the Harvard Film Archive where he curates the HFA cinematheque and its motion picture, manuscript and photographic collections. He has curated film programs for the Viennale, the Oberhausen Film Festival and the Gulbenkian Foundation and Museum in Lisbon where he organized the twelve part Cinema Dialogues: Harvard at the Gulbenkian (2013-15). Guest also oversees the Harvard Film Archive’s preservation program which focuses on independent and avant-garde cinema, but also recently preserved the previously lost Robert Flaherty film A NIGHT OF STORYTELLING, rediscovered in 2013 in Harvard’s Houghton Library. As Senior Lecturer in Harvard’s Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, Guest teaches courses on film history and archival practice. He holds a PhD in Film History from the University of California, Los Angeles. 

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and Palm Springs, California. He is the Assistant Professor of film in the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University and a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. In Portland, Oregon he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non fiction forms of media. His work has played at various festivals including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival. He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and has had solo exhibitions at the Center for Curatorial Studies–Bard College in 2020, at LUMA in Arles, France in 2022, and in 2024 at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, WA and Kunsthalle Friart in Switzerland. 

Kelly Long is an art worker and writer currently serving as Senior Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where she has worked with the Photography Acquisitions Committee since 2017, and developed exhibitions such as Rachel Harrison Life Hack (2019) and Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith (2023). Most recently, she curated Trust Me (2023), a group exhibition exploring the role that vulnerability plays in forging connection, and the overlapping lives and loves of photography’s creators, viewers, and caretakers. Previously, she has held curatorial and teaching positions at the George Eastman Museum and at the University of Rochester. Her writing has appeared in the catalogues for Chiharu Shiota: The Hand Lines and Gail Thacker: Fugitive Moments, and in publications such as InVisible Culture and Mossflower. 

Greil Marcus is a critic who has written extensively on rock 'n' roll and folk music within the context of American culture and politics. His books include Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music (1975); Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989); Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs (2022); and What Nails It--Why I Write (2024). Marcus was born in San Francisco and lives in Oakland. He started writing for Rolling Stone in 1968 and has since written regularly for Artforum, Interview, The Believer, and currently on his Substack site Letter from the Ether.  Since 2000 he has taught at Berkeley, Princeton, the New School, NYU, and the Graduate Center in New York. 

Rani Singh is the Director of the Harry Smith Archives. Based in Santa Monica, California, Singh focuses on strategic planning and legacy management for artists and artists’ estates. Previously she worked as Director of Special Projects at Gagosian Gallery and for many years at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles in Modern & Contemporary Collections. She met Harry Smith at Naropa Institute and was his assistant until his passing in 1991 when she initiated the Harry Smith Archives a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the location, preservation and presentation of the work of Harry Smith. (Harry Smith Archives www.harrysmitharchives.com) Singh joined the Getty in 2000 as a scholar in residence based on her work on Harry Smith. She was responsible for the placement of the Harry Smith Papers at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles and the acquisition by the Bob Dylan Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma of Smith’s books and records. 

P. Adams Sitney is a preeminent film theorist and historian of European and American avant-garde film. Known for his early intellectual and critical support of the New American Cinema movement, he wrote Visionary Film (Oxford, 1974), widely regarded as the first major history of postwar American avant-garde filmmaking. The author of Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (Oxford, 2009), Vital Crises in Italian Cinema: Iconography, Stylistics, Politics (University of Texas, 1995), and Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision in Cinema and Literature (Columbia, 1992), he has also edited several essay collections on filmography. Sitney was an important figure in the early years of New York University’s doctoral program in Cinema Studies, which was established in 1970. He was a founder of New York’s Anthology Film Archives and has served as a member of its Essential Cinema film selection committee. 

Since joining the Whitney Museum as Curator in 1991, Elisabeth Sussman has organized special and traveling exhibitions—most recently, Rachel Harrison Life Hack, Nick Mauss: Transmissions, and Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith. She has also curated or co-curated two exhibitions which won International Association of Art Critics (AICA) annual awards for best monographic show in New York; Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective (2010), and Gordon Matta-Clark: “You Are the Measure” (2007). Other notable Whitney exhibitions include Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes (1993), Nan Goldin: I’ll Be Your Mirror (1996), and the Whitney Biennial in 1993 and 2012. She held the position of Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography from 2004-2023, during which time she oversaw the Whitney’s collection of photography and the Photography Acquisition Committee. Before joining the Whitney, Ms. Sussman served as Interim Director (1991) and Deputy Director for Programs (1989–91) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, following stints as Chief Curator (1982–89) and Curator (1976–82).