Events
Shop Takeover
Alexandria Smith
October 6–November 5, 2022
Gagosian Shop, London
Alexandria Smith is taking over the Gagosian Shop in London’s historic Burlington Arcade with sitting with my skin, a presentation of new paintings and a suite of drawings housed in the artist’s custom frames.
Smith, head of painting at the Royal College of Art, makes innovative mixed-media works that address issues of identity and growth within a constantly evolving personal cosmology. The presentation in London follows Pretend Gravitas and Dream Aborted Givens, her first solo exhibition with the gallery, which debuted in New York earlier this year. For the new body of work, on view throughout the Shop, Smith builds up dimensional elements in her painted compositions, including for the first time 3D-printed components.
Smith will also curate the reading room on the main floor of the Shop, featuring books that inform her practice, which range from experimental science fiction to Black womanist literature.
Alexandria Smith takeover at the Gagosian Shop, London, 2022. Artwork © Alexandria Smith. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Screening
Alexandria Smith Selects
May 20–June 2, 2022
Metrograph, New York
metrograph.com
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 in the theater and online. The program will feature 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.
Still from Daughters of the Dust (1991), directed by Julie Dash
Announcements
Honor
Alexandria Smith
Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow
Alexandria Smith was selected as a 2022 Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow. Through a nomination and jury process, the international residency program brings together artists, writers, and composers for six weeks to work both independently and communally at a castle in Umbria, Italy. Since its inception in 1995, Civitella Ranieri has been committed to seeking diverse populations of Fellows who encompass a wide range of backgrounds, beliefs, orientations, and values.
Photo: Marco Giugliarelli, courtesy Civitella Ranieri Foundation, 2022
Museum Exhibitions
Closed
Alexandria Smith and Liz Gre
Memoirs of a Ghost Girlhood: A Black Girl’s Window
Through Spring 2023
Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire
currier.org
Alexandria Smith has created an immersive multimedia environment incorporating wallpaper, paintings on wood, found objects, and sculpture, which is accompanied by an original site-specific sound composition by Liz Gre. Smith’s work explores Black identity through the interweaving of collective memory, autobiography, and history. Smith and Gre researched Black history in New Hampshire and visited the Portsmouth African Burying Ground, among other spiritually significant sites. Gre’s sound piece, //windowed//, re-creates the sonic environments of Manchester and Portsmouth. It will evolve over time to include recordings from visitors in response to the installation.
Alexandria Smith, The grounded makes the spirited away, 2022 (detail) © Alexandria Smith
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Alexandria Smith
Seed to Harvest
September 1, 2019–June 5, 2022
Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Massachusetts
www.wellesley.edu
In this exhibition, Alexandria Smith’s visual symbology embellishes original photographic portraits commemorating some of the first Black graduates of Wellesley College. Smith, formerly assistant professor of painting at Wellesley (2016–19), highlights narratives from the graduates’ lives and memorializes their important contributions to the college and to the world. The show was commissioned by the Davis Museum’s Windows Invitational, which invites artists to transform the floor-to-ceiling windows of the museum’s lobby and courtyard plaza.
Installation view, Alexandria Smith: Seed to Harvest, Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Massachusetts, September 1, 2019–June 5, 2022. Artwork © Alexandria Smith
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Alexandria Smith
Monuments to an Effigy
April 7–August 18, 2019
Queens Museum, New York
queensmuseum.org
Monuments to an Effigy takes the histories of the Olde Towne of Flushing Burial Ground and the Macedonia African Methodist Episcopal Church in Flushing, Queens, as points of departure for an exhibition that evokes an altar or commemorative space. In her work, Alexandria Smith explores narrative, memory, and myth through the lens of the Black female form and psyche. Rectifying stories that have been erased, in this exhibition, she honors the unnamed women laid to rest at the Olde Towne of Flushing Burial Ground (only men were named on the four marked gravestones found there) and those who participated in the Underground Railroad network in Flushing, which included the Macedonia AME Church.
Installation view, Alexandria Smith: Monuments to an Effigy, Queens Museum, New York, April 7–August 18, 2019. Artwork © Alexandria Smith. Photo: Hai Zhang, courtesy Queens Museum
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The Lure of the Dark
Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night
March 3, 2018–March 10, 2019
MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts
massmoca.org
For centuries, painters have been drawn to the mysteries and marvels of the night and its perceptual and poetic possibilities. This exhibition is about night and the light that illuminates the darkness. It features paintings that illustrate the ways in which the hours of darkness continue to provoke the contemporary imagination. Work by Cy Gavin and Alexandria Smith is included.
Installation view, The Lure of the Dark: Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night, MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, March 3, 2018–March 10, 2019. Artwork © Cy Gavin. Photo: David Dashiell
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Alexandria Smith
A Litany for Survival
November 8, 2018–January 27, 2019
BU Art Galleries, Boston University
www.bu.edu
A Litany for Survival is an installation of recent figure-based paintings and drawings by Alexandria Smith. Exploring Black female subjectivity, Smith’s tonally rich canvases often centralize pairs of figures that reside within environments that are subtly political and, at times, intentionally nondescript. Depicted in profile, the figures are simultaneously mirror images and twins. Through these painterly acts of doubling, Smith embodies multiple states of being, while also exploring concepts of hybridity and duality.
Alexandria Smith, The Nocturnes, 2017 © Alexandria Smith