About the Project
During his residency, Bayeté created a prototype for a larger public art project titled Boombox as Community Music. Through workshops offered at his local laundromat in Washington Heights, he worked with his neighbors to collect and record music and sound recordings that have personal significance to them. Bayeté’s larger project broadcasted a series of musical mashups from these contributions.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Bayeté Ross Smith is an artist, photographer and arts educator. His work has been shown nationally and internationally with exhibitions at the Goethe Institute (Accra, Ghana); Zacheta National Gallery of Art, (Warsaw, Poland); Leica Gallery (New York, NY); Rush Arts Gallery (New York, NY); The Richmond Art Center (Richmond, CA); Patricia Sweetow Gallery (San Francisco, CA); Oakland Museum of California (San Francisco, CA); Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco, CA); DePaul University Museum (Chicago, IL); and the 2008 Sundance Film Festival (Park City, UT).
He has held artist fellowships and residencies at the Kala Institute Berkeley CA; Can Serrat International Art Center, Barcelona, Spain; McColl Center for Visual Art, in Charlotte, NC; and Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA. As an arts educator, Ross Smith has taught at the International Center for Photography, the California College of the Arts and has worked as a teacher and mentor for youth on community based art projects in major cities throughout the U.S. He received a B.S. in Photojournalism from Florida A&M University and an M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts.