Dance
The new exhibit No Gyal Can Test by stylist and multidisciplinary artist Akeem Smith uses personal history to offer an intimate and nostalgic window into the heart of Jamaica’s dancehall culture.
One day, when he was 6 years old, Akeem Smith brought a dose of chaos to his primary school in Kingston, Jamaica. He had popped a pair of colored contact lenses into his eyes and strolled into class like it was no big deal. Except, of course, that it kind of was. “It was havoc. Everyone wanted to see,” he remembers, a smile stretching across his warm pillow of a face. The contacts, given to him by an aunt, weren’t in themselves outrageous. They were a fairly standard green or hazel, the kind that were trendy in the late ’90s and early 2000s. But at an age when many children are just mastering the dexterous art of tying their shoes, Smith had already planted himself in some far-off, fashionable future.
In a life peppered with evidence of what he calls eccentricities, this was an early confirmation to Smith of what he’d come to suspect about himself: that he was a little bit different than many people around him and a lot more willing to announce it. As a child, Smith registered contacts-gate as permission from his family to honor and pursue self-expression through style. It was something cornily like destiny, then, that he would go on to establish himself as a quietly radical figure in New York’s fashion world, planting left-of-center ideas that would trickle into the mainstream. His CV includes work with the avant- garde, post-identity brand Hood By Air, the legacy house Helmut Lang and resourced, cool-obsessed newcomers like Yeezy and V-Files.
But from the vantage point of time, Smith, now in his late 20s, can identify another, more complex motivator underlying his experimentation. Born in the U.S. but raised in Jamaica, he was acutely aware that the gulf that separated him from his schoolmates and neighbors in Kingston wasn’t just stylistic. It was also structural. The ability to travel and to make a life beyond the island offered access to a whole new world. For the less fortunate, limited global mobility often meant limited possibilities. “I think I was doing things to show that I was a foreigner,” he says.
Even as its cultural production has for decades been a galvanizing global force in the worlds of music, fashion and dance, Jamaica sits at a complex intersection governed in part by the legacies of colonialism, imperialism, capital and extractive globalization. One unfortunate result: The nuanced experiences of the real people creating the culture are flattened to suit external narratives, beholden to exploitative gazes and power-mitigated portrayals.
This intuitive understanding has long informed Smith’s work as a stylist and creative director. But it coalesces more obviously in a new creative endeavor he is diligently embarking on: a major entry into the formal art world, where sculpture, video and installation offer new avenues to explore the layered ideas and experiences that have shaped his worldview. This fall, he’ll open his first solo gallery show in collaboration with Red Bull Arts. The exhibition, a multidisciplinary exploration of dancehall fashion and culture called Akeem Smith: No Gyal Can Test, is a bold step in manifesting his life’s work.
On a frigid afternoon in January, Smith has commandeered a darkened corner in the rear of Red Bull Arts’ West Chelsea location. He’s wearing a tofu-colored T-shirt, a blue velour Fubu zip-up with patriotic red and white accents and slim navy pants that evoke something between school uniform and contemporary athleisure. Triangulated in a plush love seat, he dangles his feet a few inches off the floor. A pair of brown snakeskin square-toe mules from Martine Rose, adorned with a gold chain, fits snugly over white athletic socks. What would, frankly, register as a bizarre outfit on anyone else looks perfectly chic on Smith.
Later this year, this space will be transformed to host No Gyal Can Test. But for now, there’s much work to complete. A collaborator is sloped over a computer screen nearby, logging hundreds—maybe even thousands, says Smith—of hours of ’90s dancehall-party footage that will anchor the show’s thematic, multichannel videos. He intermittently drops out of this interview to call out directions to his editor: This clip, of a woman in a transcendent red leather outfit, should be filed under “Memory”; that one, of a zebra-print-clad dancer writhing in shallow water, belongs under “Reconstruction.”
Smith speaks slowly and deliberately, almost Obama-like, as the proverbial wheels in his head turn. And then he picks up where he left off, mid- sentence, laser-focused on the thread of our conversation long after I’ve lost it. On a back wall, a generously sized whiteboard keeps track of his ideas and progress. He’s only about a third of the way through, he admits. But if he’s expressing little of the panic you’d expect of a first-time artist pushing up against a deadline, he says coolly, that’s because he’s uniquely positioned to pull this show off.
“I know I have a certain eye. I know no one’s ever going to see it [the same] way, so I’m not precious with the material. There’s a bunch of dancehall videos on YouTube. A bunch of people have tried to do [similar] shit,” he says, a glint in his eye suggesting he’s enjoying being shady. “But it’s just not going to land because it feels like the intention is, ‘Look what I’ve rediscovered!’ I’ve seen people try to act like they’re some insiders or something because they got a couple of clips.”
Smith, on the other hand, identifies squarely as an insider. He grew up under the shadow of Ouch, a custom tailoring shop owned and run by his godmother. Ouch was home to designers who shaped the look of ’90s Jamaican dancehall, dressing both civilians and icons like Beenie Man, Patra and Lady Saw, whose music and personal style established them as some of the genre’s most visible artists. Smith has since been passed the baton of its legacy. Meanwhile, his grandmother co-owned a club that incubated some of the fashion, culture and music that defines dancehall. He’s not precious with the material because he’s lived it. “The dancehall community is not that big for it to have had [such a significant] cultural impact on the world. And it’s kind of even shunned upon in Jamaica,” Smith says. The scene’s influence, which spread globally through informal networks of party videos, is indelible. Aesthetics like gravity-defying hairstyles, colorful, couture-style fashions and gymnastic dances lent it an almost renegade cultural status. And Smith was right in the middle of its boom.
Accordingly, No Gyal Can Test is informed by Smith’s experience of being brought up between Jamaica and New York. The show’s conceptual goals are buoyed by his painstakingly collected archive of images and videos of the dancehall scene at its peak. It will also feature structures built out of material sourced in the Kingston neighborhood he grew up in. “My own family, this is my real source,” he says. “Like, I don’t need to go far to find the inspo.”
After spending his first 11 years in Kingston, Smith traversed a literal and figurative ocean to resettle in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Under the watchful eyes of his grandma and his young mother, he quickly grew accustomed to life in the U.S. The precocious kid skipped fifth grade— he’d sidestepped third grade back in Jamaica—and leaned into the unique nature of children who spend a lot of time in the company of adults. Already a clever student, he learned a slippery, intangible skill that would help him navigate this new culture. “Coming [to America], I realized I had a lot of opportunity and I was going to take advantage of that in any shape,” he says. “I realized pretty quickly that there are a lot of shortcuts in America.”
Like many young New Yorkers, often grown beyond their years and almost preternaturally disposed to excel at one hustle or another, Smith ventured into the real world early. His childhood ambitions of being a broadcast journalist were supplanted with plans to be a writer; in high school, he attended the famed Iowa Writers’ Summer Workshop. In time, that too was supplanted by a whole new interest: fashion. “I knew I wanted a career that would align with my social life. And the writing that I was trying to do was political writing. I don’t think that would’ve worked,” he remembers. “I was like, ‘Should I do fashion journalism?’ And then I read fashion stories and I was like, ‘Oh my God, am I going to write reviews on cuffs and shit?’"
A chance encounter with a stylist offered a natural entry point to the fashion world. Smith wasn’t writing about cuffs, but he was considering them. By the time he went to college and worked jobs in art and PR, Smith had accumulated another decade’s worth of experiences that would sharpen his perspective: A brief period of attending a Pan- African Saturday school shaped his racial identity; enrolling in a predominantly white Manhattan arts high school opened all kinds of doors and opportunities; being young and openly gay in the city granted yet another set of experiences. His life spanned so many seemingly disparate corners that it necessitated a kind of self-awareness and facility with fluid identity that would quietly steer his work.
“I wanted to create people, scenarios, themes that covered all socioeconomic [classes]. Like, to create a girl that cannot necessarily blend in, but could be in any situation,” he remembers of his point-of-view as a young stylist. “She can be in the fucking hood, and be OK, and look great. And she can be wherever else she’s at and look great, and feel great, and just not be a weirdo. Because I think that’s sort of what I was always looking for in a friend, or I felt maybe that’s what I represented.”
Fashion made it possible to do that. “The fashion world is corporate. But I think why I like fashion people is they definitely set the tone,” he points out. “Fashion has the people with the open minds, and I knew I wanted to be around open-minded people.”
And yet while fashion offered Smith room to wiggle within an expanded worldview, it also presented clear problems. The seeds of No Gyal Can Test were planted a decade ago, when he saw an editorial in a fashion magazine that made him bristle. The story was intended as a reflection on dancehall style and culture. But to Smith’s expert eyes, the inaccuracies were clear, and dangerous. They posed a problem for posterity, and for the broader culture the piece incorrectly invoked.
“If someone gets that magazine in 10 years, it’s far gone from what dancehall is. People are going to think this is what it is,” says Smith. “And it got to that whole erasure of culture. It struck that chord, so I was like, I was destined to do something to represent it accurately.”
Just outside Smith’s makeshift workspace is an ad-hoc Kingston cityscape. The bright, white-walled space has been conquered by a newly arrived shipment of materials he hand-selected on a recent trip to Jamaica. Faded doors, corrugated tin, scraps of all kinds lie in piles. Some, he says, are from the remnants of his grandmother’s club. Others were sourced in and around his childhood neighborhood, objects that resonated with him for one reason or another and that he is tasked with turning into the structures that will anchor the show.
“I want to confront how people view images. Some people do need to see certain things like a frame in order to give it [meaning]. But I’m somewhat challenging that. I’m so into deprogramming people. 'Like, why do I think this is cool? Because it’s in this frame on this wall?'”
He’s careful to point out that he didn’t simply take the items. He is concerned with ethically procuring materials. That exchange is as much a part of the piece as the objects themselves, a corrective in the balance of power that often characterizes projects of this nature. A similar ethos guided his acquisition of a growing dancehall archive, including a trove bequeathed from the Ouch family.
A few years after he decided to help archive and preserve the history of his childhood, Smith went to Jamaica to link up with a family friend, Photo Morris, who had been tasked with documenting his grandmother’s parties in their heyday. “He’s the one that used to take most of the photos,” recalls Smith. He was heartbroken to discover that Photo Morris had been in a car crash that left him disabled from the waist down and living in “squalor.” Smith began to help out financially, eventually buying negatives of Photo Morris’s work. “I was like, ‘Forget the prints. Let me rescue the negatives.’” Soon he connected with other family friends—photographers and videographers who had between them amassed years’ worth of dancehall documentation—and began accumulating material. “They didn’t understand [what I was doing] but they definitely trusted me. They led on blind faith,” says Smith.
People have tried to get video footage over the years, and as a result, people like Photo Morris are protective of their work. “They don’t let just anyone in, especially if they feel they’re being lowballed or something like that. And with me, I would just never lowball anyone that looks like me. I made sure they got how much I would’ve paid an American person.”
It was an investment. “I really used all my money to do it because I just feel like it’s how you start something,” he says. “I know what money equals in a third-world place. It’s not just a financial thing. It’s a domino effect. It’s just going to open more doors.”
The art world has long obsessed over identity, but in recent years, the bounds of that identity have expanded. As the author and cultural theorist Kevin Quashie wrote, there has been lately, when it comes to art made by Black people, a will “to move beyond the emphasis on resistance, and to suggest that concepts like surrender, dreaming, and waiting can remind us of the wealth of Black humanity.”
When I mention this to Smith, pointing out connections in Black cultural expression between Lagos and Kingston and Atlanta, he rejects the conceit. “Is it Black culture just because a Black person is doing it?” he asks. “With the show, I’m not addressing anything that is obviously Black.”
Still, No Gyal Can Test is at once a study and repudiation of identity. “People always reference Black women in hiding. I wanted it to be obvious this is the source of everything that I know and like and want,” he says. “It has an element of Black portraiture, giving name to unknown subjects of history, shit like that. We go to museums all the time and we see people on the walls that we don’t fucking know what they fucking contributed. It’s like, why can’t other communities, of any color, have the same?”
Akeem Smith: No Gyal Can Test runs September 24 to November 15 at Red Bull Arts New York. Reserve your time slot here.