Ming Smith

A striking installation of vintage, mostly black-and-white photographs by Ming Smith inaugurates the Nicola Vassell gallery, in Chelsea, revealing the artist’s seductive ability to incorporate painterly moments of near-abstraction into images as varied as celebrity portraits, street scenes, and landscapes. After graduating from Howard University, in 1973, Smith became the first female member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a New York collective of Black photographers, formed in 1963, that was recently the subject of a revelatory exhibition at the Whitney.