Artist Ming Smith and curator Daisy Desrosiers join Rail contributor Emmanuel Iduma for a conversation.

Ming Smith’s practice is a tale of five decades spent examining transitory occurrence—intervals at which figures blur, atmospheres alter, vistas haunt, souls whir, and opposites engage in allied work. Smith’s photographic approach is both scientific and celestial, and experimentation and adventure mark her fascination with detail as it stretches across form and mood. Her dedication to music, dance, and theater underlines the synergistic excellence that characterizes her secondary, if metaphoric, occupations as anthropologist, historian, and poet. Many of Smith’s subjects are well-known Black cultural figures, such as Alice Coltrane, Grace Jones, Nina Simone and Tina Turner.

Daisy Desrosiers is the Director and Chief Curator of Gund Gallery at Kenyon College since 2021. Recent projects include the exhibitions No Justice Without Love at The Ford Foundation gallery in NYC; Christine Sun Kim: Oh Me Oh My in collaboration with Remai Modern, The Tang, and CAG; Beverly Buchanan’s The idea was to capture closely related to a feeling and Ming Smith Jazz Requiem - Notations in Blue. She was also one of the inaugural co-curators of the first MOCA Toronto Triennale, GTA21, in 2021 and on the jury of the Canadian Pavilion for the 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia 2024, awarded to artist Kapwani Kiwanga in 2024.

Emmanuel Iduma is the author of two works of nonfiction, including the travelogue A Stranger’s Pose, and I Am Still With You, a memoir. His criticism and nonfiction have appeared in Aperture, Art in America, Artforum, Granta, n+1, the New York Review of Books, Yale Review, and other publications. His honors include the inaugural Irving Sandler Award for New Voices in Art Criticism from AICA-USA, the C/O Berlin Talent Prize for Theory, and the Windham-Campbell Prize. He is based between Lagos, Nigeria and Norwich, UK.

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