Shinique Smith

Shinique Smith (American, b. 1971) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes painting, sculpture, video, photography, installation and performance. Born in Baltimore, MD, she attended Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work explores ideas of transformation and ritual through materials such as fabric, clothing, personal belongings, breath, bundling, collage and gesture, building a complex visual vocabulary that resonates on intimate and social scales. Inspired by magical childhood experiences—from chanting with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, to tagging in a graffiti crew in Baltimore, to attending fashion shows in Paris and New York with her mother—Smith's practice expresses wonder, connections and ecstatic moments that she, as a Black woman, finds within textiles, keepsakes and sayings exchanged between her family, friends and travels. Her wide-ranging practice operates at the convergence of consumption and spiritual sanctuary, balancing forces and revealing connections across space, time, race, gender and place to suggest the possibility of new worlds.

Smith's creative process is guided not only by verse and lyrics but also by the act of titling her works, forming a continuous poem with each title serving as a line. Her monumental fabric sculptures and abstract paintings of calligraphy and collage reflect on her journey of growth, creating a world she can revel in and share, foregrounding the universality of the human experience and our desire to find wonder in the everyday movements of life. On her film Breathing Room: Moon Marked Journey: "This new, evolved version of Breathing Room is about Indigo, blue, the body, my body as a black woman, and the effect that the blue can have on the body, on memory, and spirit. The film recognizes the amazing blue in every piece of life and the indomitable spirit of Black women. It brings together a sensual experience of fabric, color, breath and light, memory and movement, textiles sound and sculpture." On Indigo: "With roots in Ancient Peru, India, Japan, and Africa, Indigo was considered in many cultures to represent the path to the infinite and bring one closer to the sky, a color, and history that continues to inspire. Indigo was a significant cash crop alongside cotton during the slave trade and used as currency. The painful truth is realizing that hundreds of thousands of individual African lives were each traded for 2-3 measures of this beautiful blue cloth."