Contemporary Art in Context: Shinique Smith

Artist Shinique Smith creates monumental clothing sculptures, abstract paintings with calligraphy and collage, installations, videos, and performances that represent the intersection of personal history and cultural experiences, revealing connections across time, place, race, and gender to suggest a brighter future.

Influences and Process
Smithʼs extensive multimedia body of work has established an expressive, poetic visual vocabulary over the last two decades, employing clothing, bundling, and calligraphy as tools of abstraction. Her works exemplify the postmodern principle of “layering” in works that range from small, hand-held bundles to monolithic bundles containing carefully chosen mementos from her life and her travels. She also embeds such mementos in her complex, abstract paintings. These works reflect the influence of fashion, dance, graffiti, Japanese calligraphy, and poetry.

Household objects, past experiences, and the human environment all inspire Smith’s work. The artistʼs incorporation of objects and clothing in her works comes from her conviction that such things are imbued with the experience and memories of the people who used them, which lines up with the belief of many African cultures in animism, that all things, including the objects people use, have a soul.

Selected Works
Smith is renowned for her totemic sculptures made from bundles of clothing, which she refers to as “bales.” They are often standalone “stelae,” or combined with other (personal) objects, as seen in her work Mitumba Deity II. Mitumba is Swahili (a sub-Saharan African language) for “clothing,” specifically the plastic-wrapped bundles of used Western clothing donated to African countries. This work has made a monument to that contemporary practice, positioned on a Rococo-style piece of furniture to emphasize the connection to the West. The piece expresses Smith’s concern about consumption and overproduction of clothes that affects the environment, particularly in underserved parts of the world.

Metamorph, like Mitumba Deity II, is an example of how Smith creates small worlds within big worlds in her complex compositions of shapes, forms, and objects. Metamorph, which refers to changing form in nature, is part of the artist’s ongoing transformation of material processes, particularly in its combination of gestural, calligraphy-like brushwork with small patches of clothing and collage, microcosms within a macrocosm. As the artist states, “Metamorph refers to being a shapeshifter…I too am transforming in the midst of it” (referring to her body of work).

Art History: Personal Narratives
Rarely before the 20th century have artists emphasized a body of work that reflects personal histories or narratives. Major exceptions to that would be the artists Francisco Goya (1746–1828) and Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), who laid bare their own feelings about social concerns in their art. Conversely, already in the earliest flowering of African American art during the Harlem Renaissance (ca. 1920s–1930s), Black artists addressed personal as well as communal histories as a way of expressing pride in their unique contributions to the American experience. African Americans continue to imbue their art with combinations of public awareness and personal reference. Smith’s joyous, complex combinations of fabric collage, line, pattern, and color contribute yet another square into the rich quilt of African American and American art history.

About the Artist
Shinique Smith was born in Baltimore, the daughter of a visionary fashion designer mother who encouraged her exposure to the arts at an early age. From the age of four, she studied ballet and piano and also experienced many inspirational cultural events such as prayer with the Dalai Lama, fashion shows in New York and Paris, and the numerous murals in her neighborhood growing up. She attended the Baltimore School for the Arts, where she learned graffiti from artist friends who still inspire her. After graduating from high school at sixteen, she received a BFA (1992) from Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the same school (2003). She also received an MA in education in 2000 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University in Boston. Smith has received many awards and prizes for her art and is represented in the collections of many prestigious American and international museums.

ARTIST Q&A
What are some of the biggest influences on your work?
SS: The biggest influence has been the travels and experiences that I shared with my mother who ran with an incredible group of Indigenous elders, shamans, archaeologists, physicists, and fashion people all over the world. Iʼve gone to sacred sites, participated in spiritual ceremonies, and seen all kinds of textiles that many people, especially young Black girls from West Baltimore, rarely get to experience. The knowledge gathered has shaped the way I see life and the world and allows me the ability to shape my practice into my own ritualistic journey of truth, discovery, and personal wonder.

Are there any cultural fabrics that inspire your paintings?
SS: Yes, all. My work brings many cultures, economics, and fashion eras together. My works are time capsules that reflect the world I see and live in. Iʼve been amassing a large collection of fabrics from places Iʼve traveled, [and] family and friends, and among them are vintage indigo cloths from Africa, Indonesia, and Japan; Scottish plaid; Dutch wax cloth; Fijian tapas; paisleys; embroideries and madras from India; embroideries from Kabul; and a myriad of clothing and cloth from across America, to name a few.

Conversely, how does painting influence your fiber pieces?
SS: The works are made simultaneously. Fabric from sculptures go into the paintings, and mark-making from the paintings goes onto the sculptures and the textiles that I create. The paintings are a flat, seemingly freer version of the three-dimensional container of my bundled sculptures.

Do you feel that a certain medium has conveyed your messages better than others?
SS: That may be a question for viewers of my work. Some people respond to paintings and some to sculptures, but I suppose I could say that my public works, my aluminum sculpture, [and] my mosaic murals and painted murals reach the most eyes and have the most immediate response.

What is the role of your support community (assistants, art dealers, collectors, etc.)? How do you develop this network of support?
SS: Curators have seen my potential and shared my work with the public and have helped further my career and my confidence. They have given me platforms and exposure to the critics, galleries, and collectors. A few of whom I have stayed friends with for the last twenty years and we have grown together.

Collectors who have seen my work and potential have helped sustain me and encouraged my path, too. There are a few amazing individuals and corporate collections that consider the span of my practice and are invested in artistʼs legacies. They are rare jewels. The same goes for art dealers. Some have sold the work, which was awesome, but others have truly understood and are also invested in an artistʼs legacy in addition to their market.

Assistants have helped me in my physical and administrative labors, while I have provided them with mentorship and advice. This has been one of the mainstays of an old-school studio practice.

I work with advisors, an amazing architect and with fabricators who have helped me realize my small drawings into monumental artworks and helped expand my vision and the reach of my hand.
A percentage of all these afore-listed supporters are temporary or transient, but the constants have been and will always be my family, friends, and artist peers. They have generously offered the most significant dialogue and support over the years, as inspirations and witnesses to my evolution as a person and artist.

If you could go back in time, what advice would you give yourself as an emerging artist? (Or what advice do you have for other emerging or aspiring artists?)
SS: Donʼt let anyone intimidate you into hiding your light. Shine and let them find shade.

Can you tell us about any upcoming projects?
SS: I am launching a new creative educational project for children this summer. For details, watch shiniquesmith.com or @shiniquesmith on Instagram.

I recently finished a solo exhibition PARADE at the Ringling Museum of Art, where I created a performance that I am finishing as a film. My exhibition Torque is currently on view at the Indianapolis Art Museum at Newfields, where I am presenting a large sound performance in May.

The Power of Memory