Bayeté Ross Smith: confronting bias in visual journalism
Bayeté, a 2024 Street Work participant, is a multi-media artist, filmmaker, and visual journalist.
His "Our Kind of People" series, co-produced with Fotodemic, examines how clothing, race, gender, and class signifiers affect how people perceive and treat us. The series is part of a broader awareness campaign to challenge bias, facilitate education, and promote social justice in media.
As part of Street Works, Bayeté is expanding on his Hip Hip 50 Boombox series blending music and sculptures made of sugar and cotton — two of the largest cash crops of American and European colonial powers. Both of these billion-dollar industries were built by enslaved Black and indigenous peoples who received little to none of the intergenerational wealth resulting from their labor. As icons of Hip Hop, the boomboxes represent a parallel between Hip Hop’s role in the entertainment industry.
Participants in Street Work will contribute their favorite songs on freedom and liberation alongside perspective on climate change to Bayeté Ross Smith’s mix tapes on the climate change crisis, part of a life-size sculpture made out of sugarcane and cotton boombox replicas. Bayeté will collect recordings all day and mingle your favorite songs and voices in with pre-recorded perspectives from the participating artists, climate experts, and MJN.
