Shinique Smith

Photograph courtesy of LowLifeDigital.com

Portfolio of Artwork 965-970

The artist Shinique Smith creates exuberant paintings, sculptures, videos, and large-scale installations . . . .

from “Bibliophiles: Shinique Smith, Artist” by Amy Sutherland, Boston Globe, December 27, 2014

When Shinique Smith is asked to speak on her work and her practice, she does not offer her viewers double talk or linguistic masks to avoid speaking about herself and her work—and the sources from which it is derived. To the contrary, she graciously offers her viewers answers, free of duplicitous intentions:

My work implies multiple reads and is informed by an enduring interest in how the vast expanse of “things” come to shape our experiences. Consistently questioning the reason for “things,” I reinterpret the connections we build our personal myths on through the objects that we hold on to and discard to expose how excess and waste are intimately related to personal meaning and market value, which resonate on a social, and spiritual, scale.

Hip hop at its best, to me, is like “praise poetry.” The declaration of “I am . . . “ has had a strong influence on me and my work. “I am that I am” and “I am the bomb *&%$@!” is crucial to self manifestation. I’ve been a longtime fan of [Nikki] Giovanni’s poetry. Her poem “Woman” got me through some difficult times. I think that she and I are both warriors, as many women have had and continue to be. For my site-specific installation, I’ve used lyrics from rap songs married with text from Nikki Giovanni’s poem, to “riff” calligraphically and to create 3-D mantras of found objects, script, and clothing.

For me, my individual works could be read as a poem or line from a song. They are excerpts from larger stories that the past wearer of the clothing or owner of the objects participated in. This piece [No Thief to Blame] in particular honors the warrior women who have fueled me with their distinctive cries.

What one gets from listening to Shinique Smith discuss her work is a record of an artist evolving—an artist whose early youth was directly and fully informed by various types of visual art, formal and informal, and fashion design and graffiti art, the mandala, Japanese calligraphy, as well as ballet and music, including hip-hop music—in other words, a rich and enviable background for the making of an American artist who would receive her formal visual art education at the Maryland Institute College of Art in her native Baltimore.

In the interview I recorded with her by telephone on July 25, 2015, I asked her to talk about her evolution:

ROWELL:

Will you try for a moment to do what is almost impossible? Step outside yourself (or assume the role of an art critic or art historian) and talk briefly about your evolution thus far as a visual artist.

SMITH:

Well, I think that’s a really good word for it, evolution. I feel that I am still in the process of it and I like being in the process of it. I think being at the end of an evolution means that there is nowhere else to go, in my mind. I was actually thinking this morning about some work I was making in the 1990’s. It was after graduate school and I was burned out and didn’t want to make art. I was working, doing costuming, and doing these drawings on the side. They were figurative with charcoal. I have a classical training. You couldn’t abstract life if you couldn’t render life and you couldn’t understand perspective or light and chiaroscuro. I really enjoy drawing and carving light and form out of charcoal. At that point I was making these figures and drawing waves of energy emanating from them. Brown figures at first then blue figures that were more androgynous. Less about a specific part of black experience and more about humanity as a whole and trying to illustrate that. Anyway, I was just thinking about that and how these lines...