Allison Smith (artist)


Allison Smith is an American artist who is based in Oakland, California. Smith's work draws from American history to create artworks which combine social practice, performance, and craft-based sculpture.
Smith has exhibited her work professionally since 1995 in the United States and internationally. She has produced over twenty-five solo exhibitions, installations, performances, and artist-led participatory projects for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Public Art Fund, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, The Arts Club of Chicago, and Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Education and early career

Smith received a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from The New School for Social Research, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in fine arts from Parsons School of Design, and a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from the Yale University School of Art. She also participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. She lived in New York City from 1990 until 2008 when she relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area to join the faculty of California College of the Arts, where she is a tenured professor and Chair of the Sculpture Program.

Career

Allison Smith has exhibited her work professionally since 1995 in the United States and in England, France, Germany, Spain, New Zealand, and South Korea. She has produced over twenty-five solo exhibitions, installations, performances, and artist-led participatory projects for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Public Art Fund, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, The Arts Club of Chicago, and Indianapolis Museum of Art.
She has exhibited her work in over one hundred group exhibitions at galleries and museums including P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center at the Museum of Modern Art New York, Palais de Tokyo, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Andy Warhol Museum, The Mattress Factory, and The Tang Museum.
Smith has lectured on her work extensively at art schools and research universities in the United States and abroad, as well as at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SculptureCenter and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
Her work has been featured and reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Sculpture, on NPR, KQED, Art:21, and in other media and scholarly publications. Smith has received generous support from United States Artists, Arts Council England, For-Site Foundation, Creative Work Fund, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Artadia, and New York Foundation for the Arts. Notable residencies include IASPIS, The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, the Museum of Modern Art Artists Experiment initiative, the International Studio and Curatorial Program in Brooklyn, New York, Artpace San Antonio, Texas, and Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California.
Smith's work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Saatchi Gallery London and other public and private collections worldwide. Smith is represented by Haines Gallery in San Francisco.

Notable works

In 2005, Smith produced a public art project The Muster that engages with the question, "What are you fighting for?" on the subject of Civil War reenactments, involving participants who made uniforms and campsites. In an article in ArtNet News discussing art about Civil War reenactments, Brian Boucher says it "focused on the kitschy aesthetics of Civil War reenactment, referring to the conflict in only the most oblique way."