Alexandria Smith
The Lumens, 2022
Mixed media on three-dimensional wood assemblage, 60 × 48 inches (152.4 × 121.9 cm)
© Alexandria Smith. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano
My role is a testament to the hybridity and duality of cultures, the juxtaposition of states—challenging genders, guiding perceptions of the divisiveness of the self, and emphasizing the complexities of human nature.
—Alexandria Smith
Alexandria Smith’s art addresses issues of identity as informed by autobiography, fiction, myth, collective memory, and history. Combining figuration and abstraction, her works imagine hybrid figures comprised of limbs, eyes, breasts, and hair in distinctive configurations that embody physical, emotional, and metaphysical growth and transformation. Smith works across various mediums, making drawings with collage elements, paintings with sculptural assemblages, and immersive installations.
Smith was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1981. She earned her BFA in illustration from Syracuse University, New York; MA in art education from New York University; and MFA from Parsons School of Design, New School, New York. From 2017 through 2018 she served as co-organizer of the collective Black Women Artists for Black Lives. She lives and works in New York, and is assistant professor in painting and printmaking and director of undergraduate studies at the Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut.
As a recipient of the 2018–19 Queens Museum/Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists, Smith created Monuments to an Effigy (2019), an installation inspired by her research into the Olde Towne of Flushing Burial Ground and the Macedonia African Methodist Episcopal Church in Flushing, Queens—a historic hub of the African American community. The installation commemorates both the lives of anonymous Black and Indigenous women interred at these sites and those who were part of Flushing’s Underground Railroad network. Featuring paintings, sculptures, columns, and pews, Monuments to an Effigy was accompanied by At Council; Found Peace, a musical composition written by Liz Gre in collaboration with Smith.
In 2022, Smith had her first solo exhibition at Gagosian, New York, Pretend Gravitas and Dream Aborted Givens. The collage drawings and assemblage paintings on view reimagine lived experiences through nonlinear narrative threads. These multidimensional works envision figures affected by elemental forces across interconnected primordial landscapes. Also in 2022, she installed Memoirs of a Ghost Girlhood: a Black Girl’s Window at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire. Based in part on the artist’s research into Black history in the state, this multimedia environment incorporates wallpaper, paintings, found objects, and sculpture, with an original site-specific sound composition by Gre.
Alexandria Smith and Akwaeke Emezi take up themes of queerness, hybridity, and embodied memory in their respective visual and literary works. Here, Emezi responds to Smith’s painting Languorous undulations (in the temple of my familiar) (2022) with an eponymous piece of flash fiction.
Alexandria Smith has curated a selection of films that have influenced her practice for many years, as part of a series copresented by Gagosian and Metrograph. The program, on view in the theater and online from May 20 to June 2, 2022, features cinema exploring themes of loneliness through the prism of the fantastical, notions of family through spirituality, and the deconstruction of narrative through the disruption and manipulation of time.
The artist speaks with author Nalo Hopkinson about what it means to depict the body, the struggles to embark on new projects, and the contours of space and place in the creation of fiction and art.
