Shinique Smith


Shinique Smith is an American visual artist, known for her colorful installation art and paintings that incorporate found textiles and collage materials. She is based in Brooklyn, New York.

Early life

Born in 1971, in Baltimore, Maryland, Smith's artistic training began in childhood, encouraged toward the creative arts by her mother, who is a former fashion designer and magazine editor. Smith was a Visual Arts major at the Baltimore School for the Arts, studying alongside Jada Pinkett Smith, Tupac Shakur, and Josh Charles. She had also studied ballet with Caryl Maxwell, starting at age four.
In high school, Smith was influenced by artists in the Baltimore graffiti scene, an aesthetic also visible in her mature work. Another major influence on her artistic development was her study of Japanese calligraphy in undergraduate school.
After earning her BFA at Maryland Institute College of Art, Smith worked as a costumer and props assistant on motion pictures such as Disclosure, Guarding Tess, Serial Mom, and That Night. From 1995-2000, Smith served on the Advisory Board of 911 Media Arts Center in Seattle, where she launched Seattle's first festival of African American film and video called Flav'a Fest. Described in the press as "an annual journey through the visions, lives and dreams of media makers of African ancestry," Smith's festival hosted films by emerging and established filmmakers such as Cheryl Dunye, Cauleen Smith, Barbara McCullough, Kasi Lemmons, and Charles Burnett.
After working in the film industry, Smith returned to her studies earned a Master of Arts in Education from Tufts University in 2000 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2003. In 2003, Smith moved to New York and participated in The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's artist studio residency, where she began making sculpture.
She often incorporates used clothing and stuffed animals into her two-dimensional and three-dimensional works. "Smith's kaleidoscopic sculptures and paintings are graceful yet forceful combinations of many different materials and ideas ... The works are meant to convey her personal history as well as a greater sense of cultural concern and connectivity", says Frist Center curator Katie Delmez.

Art and career

Shinique Smith combines fine art media with everyday materials, such as found objects and clothing. She began to include used clothing in her work after reading a New York Times Magazine article about secondhand garments shipped to Africa from thrift stores. She describes her process as a personal one: "It all begins with emotion, an expression and I allow myself to go on a journey in the making of each work, a journey of associations between object and color, between lyrics and fabric, between the viewer and me."
Her work gained critical attention when The Studio Museum of Harlem exhibited her first bale sculpture in Frequency in 2005, an exhibition that helped launch the careers of other artists of Smith's generation such as, Nick Cave, Kalup Linzy, Xaviera Simmons and Hank Willis Thomas.
Smith's sculptural works were also prominently featured in the acclaimed launch exhibition of the new New Museum, Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, which featured works by Sam Durant, Urs Fischer, Isa Genzken, Elliott Hundley, and Jim Lambie to name a few. Another seminal exhibition in which Smith's work was prominently featured is The in 2009 from the Rubell Collection in Miami. This exhibition of African American artists has toured extensively since 2009 and been a favored by critics and viewers at many museums across the U.S. featuring works by such notable artists as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Rashid Johnson, Kerry James Marshall, Lorna Simpson, Mickalene Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems and Kehinde Wiley among others.
Since these exhibitions, Smith's works have been exhibited at numerous venues internationally, including a recent 2014 survey of her work BRIGHT MATTER at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, where Jen Mergel, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art described the palette of Smith's works in the exhibition and use of found materials as "a product of United States culture especially from the 1980s." Mergel said the exhibition "reflects an essential aspect of Smith's practice: how to visually manifest emotional connection, belief and the resilience of human energy through gestures and materials that shape daily life. Her work is an embodiment of the powerful spectrum of expression that for Smith, leans toward joy.
Also in 2014, Smith was commissioned by The Rose F. Kennedy Greenway in Boston to create a mural for their rotating exhibition wall. Smith's work, Seven Moon Junction was nationally recognized as one of the Best Public Art Projects Annually by Americans for the Arts Public Art Year in Review. The Greenway also commissioned Smith to create an accompanying dance performance video, Gesture III: One Great Turning, a collaboration with Boston-based KAIROS Dance Theater, which was filmed on The Greenway in front Smith's mural.

Awards and collections

Shinique Smith received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 2013, The Maryland Institute College of Art's Alumni Medal of Honor in 2012, and a Joan Mitchell Prize in 2008. Smith's work is included in several prestigious permanent collections, including the Ackland Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Denver Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Palmer Museum of Art, The Rubell Family Collection, Miami; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
She is represented by David Castillo Gallery, Miami.

Select solo exhibitions

2018

MOCA Jacksonville, Shinique Smith: Project Atrium Quickening, March 19 - June 26

2015

Rotating