“Who Is A Threat? Who Is A Victim” from Bayeté Ross Smith’s Taking AIM series.
Our Kind Of People, parts 1, 3, and 4, by Bayeté Ross Smith.
Installation shot of Got The Power Boomboxes: Harlem, by Bayeté Ross Smith.
Sugar cane and cotton boomboxes from Bayeté Ross Smith’s Got The Power Boomboxes series.
Still image from Bayeté Ross Smith’s interactive multimedia project West 4th Street.
Still image from Bayeté Ross Smith’s interactive multimedia project West 4th Street.
Bayeté Ross Smith's "Firsthand Account: The Assassination of Malcolm X" for the New York Times.
Art of Justice
Bayeté Ross Smith is a photographer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator who explores issues around preconceived notions of identity and how they impact our understanding and engagement in humanity’s past, present, and future.
Artist BioLaw students represent the next generation of professionals poised to directly shape the creation and implementation of public policy and law. Bayeté Ross Smith hopes to impact their perspectives and elevate thoughtfulness, empathy, and social consciousness during the formative years of their professional training. Art of Justice is a series of socially-engaging art installations and interventions at top tier law schools, law firms, and district attorneys’ offices that address contemporary social issues, including unconscious bias, economic justice, and political accountability. The work expands the purpose of art beyond its typical confines to reach future political leaders, prosecutors, firm partners, and policymakers.
Bayeté Ross Smith
New York, NY
Bayeté Ross Smith is a photographer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator who explores issues around preconceived notions of identity and how they impact our understanding and engagement in humanity’s past, present, and future. He is a 2021 Creative Capital Awardee, a Presidential Leadership Scholar, a TED Resident, an Art For Justice Fund grantee and a POV/New York Times embedded mediamaker. His work is in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the Oakland Museum of California, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Brooklyn Museum. The collaborative project Along The Way and Question Bridge: Black Males have shown at the Sundance Film Festival, as well as the Sheffield Doc Fest in England and the L.A. Film Festival. Ross Smith has created community and public art projects with organizations such as BRIC Arts Media, The Laundromat Project, the NYC Parks Department, the Hartford YMCA, the Jerome Foundation, the California Judicial Council, and San Francisco District Attorney’s Office. He assists with programming and workshops for the Kings Against Violence Initiative (KAVI), a hospital and school-based violence prevention organization in New York City that partners with Kings County Hospital. He is also a faculty member at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Photo: Mike Berlin and Karl Peterson.