Shinique Smith
Arcadian Clusters, installation 2014.
About:
Baltimore-native Shinique Smith works widely across painting, drawing, collage, and installation art. Smith creates environments that evoke movement and energy, while occupying the space with a range of emotional colors. Her works evoke embodied artifacts with consciences of street smarts. Graffiti, secondhand finds, and neo-tribalism interact with Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Japanese calligraphy to create playful alternations between overt messages and subtext, evoking the textile weaves of Smith’s oft-used materials themselves. Smith says, “I think my work is very American, and the way we consume and cast off is unique to us.” In an exhaustive effort to process and restore culture, Smith creates menageries that blend high- and lowbrow expressions of the artistic process. In this project, Smith creates a site-specific installation in the museum’s Education Wing in collaboration with youth from Reach Studio Art Center in Lansing.
Arcadian Clusters, installation 2014 (detail)
About the Artist
Shinique Smith (b. 1971, Baltimore MD) is an artist living and working in Hudson, New York. Smith is inspired by the vast vocabulary of things we consume and discard. Examining the ways in which such objects can resonate on a personal and social scale, Smith pursues the graceful and spiritual qualities in the written word and the everyday. In works made from the class of objects we call “belongings,” she combines “the intractable geometry and hard thinking that defines urban with the softening, emotionally steeped influence of the worn-down, nostalgic or forgotten,” while at the same time questioning the relationships that contemporary societies have with the inanimate and the intimate. Through these efforts, a new spirit emerges.
My Song to Sing, 2013.
Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Deutsche Guggenheim (Berlin), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The New Museum (New York), and MoMA/PS1 (New York) to name just a few. The artist has had more than 20 solo exhibitions, most recently at James Cohan Gallery in New York and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). In September 2014, Ms. Smith will have a major solo exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. (text website Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, 2014) (Courtesy Yvon Lambert Paris)
