“It is important that they are there declaring their existence,” Patti Smith said of the Occupy Wall Street activists, even naming Occupy Hartford. And, she said, in between songs Thursday evening at the Wadsworth Atheneum, “we should look to them with love and pride.”

The musical performance by Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye (whom she has worked with for forty years), and her daughter, Jesse Smith, was a benefit show for the museum; it also marked the opening of her exhibition, Camera Solo, and coincided with poet Arthur Rimbaud’s birthday, which she honors every year.

The show began with “Grateful,” written for Jerry Garcia, and the between-song-banter was not nervous noise to fill empty space, but stories about different photographs in her exhibit. To this, she added poetry. If you wondered how poetry was meant to be read, the answer is by Smith, who understands where lines break, where words are meant to be drawn out, and how to enunciate consonants correctly. Her performance of “The Tyger” by William Blake showed more about that poem than most critiques of it could hope for. This was followed by “My Blakean Year.”

Before playing “Ghost Dance,” Smith spoke about the origins of her father’s coffee cup, which is on display next to a photo she took of it. After dedicating that song to her father, she explained why she then needed to play one (“Mother Rose”) for her mother, who was born in Connecticut. The insights about Camera Solo added layers to what, without any investigation, may appear as stark work. The photographs of Roberto Bolaño’s chair were explained to the audience before she dedicated a song to him. Smith said, “I wanted to take a picture of something that spoke of him,” and what was there was a “humble chair,” which she called “the chair of his life” where he sat to do all of his writing. Smith honored Virginia Woolf later by reading a passage from The Waves. Besides having a photograph of Virginia Woolf’s bed, she took a picture of the river Woolf killed herself in and Smith has on display a stone from that same river; the significance of the stone is that Woolf placed them in her pockets to ensure she would stay under water during her final act. Smith followed this reading with Neil Young’s “It’s a Dream.”

Robert Mapplethorpe has a significant presence in Camera Solo. Smith read a letter she wrote to him toward the end of his life; he never had the opportunity to read it. As with much of her photo exhibit, the performance was thick with tributes to those she admired. In between two songs, she honored Mapplethorpe, Rimbaud, and the Occupy activists; the song following this interlude was “Peaceable Kingdom,” to which she added, “the people have the power…occupy” at the end.

“Pissing in a River,” which was not the last song, received a standing ovation. She closed out the show with “Because the Night,” and returned for an encore with “People Have the Power”

Next up: Review of Patti Smith’s Camera Solo exhibition