S*an D. Henry-Smith: uniform/trade secure

school presents
S*an D. Henry-Smith

uniform/trade secure

opening Friday, June 26, 7 pm

until Friday, July 24, 2026
open on Saturdays, 4–7 pm

S*an D.Henry-Smith presents new and revisited works in photography, poetry, and sound, demos and B-sides of a sort stemming from the artist and poet’s recently published collection of poems, PACES THE CAGE. Engaging voice, sound, and instrumentation of/as/and in dis/service to language, the book considers where the poem begins and the score ends and improvisation as a welcome venom to the possessive. The stage, audience, and performer are boundaries to articulate and dissolve, making all present participant-witnesses to what unfolds. During the opening, Henry-Smith will present a reading-performance blending sound and poetry.

S*an D. Henry-Smith is a poet and photographer exploring Black/queer diasporic collaborative practices rooted in experimentalism, improvisation, and transdisciplinarity, working by extension in sound, performance, and publishing. They have received awards and fellowships from the Rijksacademie, Center for Photography at Woodstock, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, the Fulbright Program, The Poetry Project, and Poets House. Recent solo exhibitions include “rea(l)m” at Metro54 (2025), “tremor low” at ROZENSTRAAT (2023) and “in awe of geometry & mornings” at White Columns (2021). Henry-Smith has read, performed, and exhibited previously at Artists Space, Stedelijk Museum, Konrad Fischer Galerie, Perdu, MoMA PS1, 47 Canal, SAVVY Contemporary, Cubitt Artists, Juf, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Issue Project Room, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Basilica Soundscape, and elsewhere. They perform musical compositions as sunchoke; as a bandmate, they are half of twill (whose twill split was released summer 2024), half of PhantomSun, half of Depth Address, and a fifth of Black Boots. Their book Wild Peach (2020), was published by Futurepoem, and shortlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, and they are the author of two chapbooks: Body Text (2016) and Flotsam Suite: A Strange & Precarious Life, or How We Chronicled the Little Disasters & I Won’t Leave the Dance Floor Til It’s Out of My System (2019), the co-author (alongside Imani Elizabeth Jackson) of Consider the Tongue (2019), and the director of Lunar New Year (2021). PACES THE CAGE (2026), their second full-length collection of poems, published by The Song Cave, is out now.