Shawn Michelle Smith
Professor, Visual Artist & Scholar, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Lecture, 4 p.m.
The Scene of the Crime: Taryn Simon's The Innocents
Winnick Chapel, Brown RISD Hillel , 80 Brown Street

Taryn Simon, from the series "The Innocents"Shawn Michelle Smith will discuss Taryn Simon's The Innocents, a project that documents 45 legal cases of mistaken identification, in which individuals were misrecognized as the perpetrators of violent crimes on the basis of mug shots and other visual aids. Like Simon, Smith will explore photography's problematic, and powerful relation to criminal identification, even as she also assesses some of the ambiguities and contradictions within Simon's provocative work.

Exhibit Opening, 5:30 p.m.
At Work in the Archive
Center for the Study of Race + Ethnicity in America (CSREA)
Floor 3R, 80 Brown Street

Shawn Michelle Smith, from the series "Images for Isaac Lowery"Shawn Michelle Smith studies photographic archives of race, calling attention to their blind spots and absences as well as their spectacles. Working with historical photographs from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries, she manipulates and transforms them in order to explore how we see and understand race in the United States.

Co-sponsored by The Humanities Initiative, Office of the Dean of Faculty, and the Center for the Study of Race + Ethnicity in America (CSREA).