About
My role is a testament to the hybridity and duality of cultures, the juxtaposition of states—challenging genders, guiding perceptions of the divisiveness of the self, and emphasizing the complexities of human nature.
—Alexandria Smith
Alexandria Smith’s art addresses issues of identity as informed by autobiography, fiction, myth, collective memory, and history. Combining figuration and abstraction, her works imagine hybrid figures comprised of limbs, eyes, breasts, and hair in distinctive configurations that embody physical, emotional, and metaphysical growth and transformation. Smith works across various mediums, making drawings with collage elements, paintings with sculptural assemblages, and immersive installations.
Smith was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1981. She earned her BFA in illustration from Syracuse University, New York; MA in art education from New York University; and MFA from Parsons School of Design, New School, New York. From 2017 through 2018 she served as co-organizer of the collective Black Women Artists for Black Lives. She lives and works in New York, and is assistant professor in painting and printmaking and director of undergraduate studies at the Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut.
As a recipient of the 2018–19 Queens Museum/Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists, Smith created Monuments to an Effigy (2019), an installation inspired by her research into the Olde Towne of Flushing Burial Ground and the Macedonia African Methodist Episcopal Church in Flushing, Queens—a historic hub of the African American community. The installation commemorates both the lives of anonymous Black and Indigenous women interred at these sites and those who were part of Flushing’s Underground Railroad network. Featuring paintings, sculptures, columns, and pews, Monuments to an Effigy was accompanied by At Council; Found Peace, a musical composition written by Liz Gre in collaboration with Smith.
In 2022, Smith had her first solo exhibition at Gagosien, New York, Pretend Gravitas and Dream Aborted Givens. The collage drawings and assemblage paintings on view reimagine lived experiences through nonlinear narrative threads. These multidimensional works envision figures affected by elemental forces across interconnected primordial landscapes. Also in 2022, she installed Memoirs of a Ghost Girlhood: a Black Girl’s Window at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire. Based in part on the artist’s research into Black history in the state, this multimedia environment incorporates wallpaper, paintings, found objects, and sculpture, with an original site-specific sound composition by Gre.
Photo: Amoroso Films
#AlexandriaSmith
Website
Languorous undulations (in the temple of my familiar)
Alexandria Smith and Akwaeke Emezi take up themes of queerness, hybridity, and embodied memory in their respective visual and literary works. Here, Emezi responds to Smith’s painting Languorous undulations (in the temple of my familiar) (2022) with an eponymous piece of flash fiction.
Alexandria Smith Selects
Alexandria Smith has curated a selection of films that have influenced her practice for many years, as part of a series copresented by Gagosien and Metrograph. The program, on view in the theater and online from May 20 to June 2, 2022, features cinema exploring themes of loneliness through the prism of the fantastical, notions of family through spirituality, and the deconstruction of narrative through the disruption and manipulation of time.
Alexandria Smith
The artist speaks with author Nalo Hopkinson about what it means to depict the body, the struggles to embark on new projects, and the contours of space and place in the creation of fiction and art.
Fairs, Events & Announcements
Art Fair
Frieze Seoul 2023
September 7–9, 2023, booth C14
COEX, Seoul
www.frieze.com
Gagosien is pleased to participate in Frieze Seoul 2023 with a presentation of contemporary works by gallery artists, including Derrick Adams, Georg Baselitz, Dan Colen, Edmund de Waal, Jadé Fadojutimi, Urs Fischer, Cy Gavin, Mehdi Ghadyanloo, Nan Goldin, Katharina Grosse, Jennifer Guidi, Thomas Houseago, Alex Israel, Rick Lowe, Takashi Murakami, Nam June Paik, Giuseppe Penone, Ed Ruscha, Alexandria Smith, Anna Weyant, Stanley Whitney, Jonas Wood, and Richard Wright, among others.
Coinciding with the fair is the arrival of Jiyoung Lee, who was recently appointed to lead the gallery’s operations in Korea. Lee joins Gagosien following nearly fifteen years based in Seoul working on behalf of both Korean and Western galleries. Her appointment builds on the gallery’s establishment of a business entity in Korea last year, and provides for expanded activities in the region.
Gagosien’s booth at Frieze Seoul 2023. Artwork, left to right: © Jadé Fadojutimi, © Jen Guidi, © Alexandria Smith, © Mehdi Ghadyanloo, © Rick Lowe Studio, © Jonas Wood, Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano
Art Fair
Taipei Dangdai 2023
May 12–14, 2023, booth E10
Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center
taipeidangdai.com
Gagosien is pleased to participate in Taipei Dangdai 2023, presenting works by Louise Bonnet, Dan Colen, Edmund de Waal, Urs Fischer, Cy Gavin, Nan Goldin, Katharina Grosse, Mark Grotjahn, Damien Hirst, Thomas Houseago, Yayoi Kusama, Deana Lawson, Takashi Murakami, Sterling Ruby, Alexandria Smith, Spencer Sweeney, Kon Trubkovich, Mary Weatherford, Cameron Welch, Anna Weyant, and Zeng Fanzhi.
Gagosien’s booth at Taipei Dangdai 2023. Artwork, left to right: © Mark Grotjahn; © Zeng Fanzhi; © 2023 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved. Photo: Ringo Cheung
Art Fair
Art Basel Hong Kong 2023
March 22–25, 2023
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
www.artbasel.com
Gagosien is pleased to participate in Art Basel Hong Kong 2023 with a presentation of modern and contemporary works by international artists.
Jadé Fadojutimi, As usual, the season’s showers tend to linger, 2023 © Jadé Fadojutimi
Museum Exhibitions
Closed
Alexandria Smith and Liz Gre
Memoirs of a Ghost Girlhood: A Black Girl’s Window
Through Spring 2023
Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire
currier.org
Alexandria Smith has created an immersive multimedia environment incorporating wallpaper, paintings on wood, found objects, and sculpture, which is accompanied by an original site-specific sound composition by Liz Gre. Smith’s work explores Black identity through the interweaving of collective memory, autobiography, and history. Smith and Gre researched Black history in New Hampshire and visited the Portsmouth African Burying Ground, among other spiritually significant sites. Gre’s sound piece, //windowed//, re-creates the sonic environments of Manchester and Portsmouth. It will evolve over time to include recordings from visitors in response to the installation.
Alexandria Smith, The grounded makes the spirited away, 2022 (detail) © Alexandria Smith
Closed
Alexandria Smith
Seed to Harvest
September 1, 2019–June 5, 2022
Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Massachusetts
www.wellesley.edu
In this exhibition, Alexandria Smith’s visual symbology embellishes original photographic portraits commemorating some of the first Black graduates of Wellesley College. Smith, formerly assistant professor of painting at Wellesley (2016–19), highlights narratives from the graduates’ lives and memorializes their important contributions to the college and to the world. The show was commissioned by the Davis Museum’s Windows Invitational, which invites artists to transform the floor-to-ceiling windows of the museum’s lobby and courtyard plaza.
Installation view, Alexandria Smith: Seed to Harvest, Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Massachusetts, September 1, 2019–June 5, 2022. Artwork © Alexandria Smith
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Alexandria Smith
Monuments to an Effigy
April 7–August 18, 2019
Queens Museum, New York
queensmuseum.org
Monuments to an Effigy takes the histories of the Olde Towne of Flushing Burial Ground and the Macedonia African Methodist Episcopal Church in Flushing, Queens, as points of departure for an exhibition that evokes an altar or commemorative space. In her work, Alexandria Smith explores narrative, memory, and myth through the lens of the Black female form and psyche. Rectifying stories that have been erased, in this exhibition, she honors the unnamed women laid to rest at the Olde Towne of Flushing Burial Ground (only men were named on the four marked gravestones found there) and those who participated in the Underground Railroad network in Flushing, which included the Macedonia AME Church.
Installation view, Alexandria Smith: Monuments to an Effigy, Queens Museum, New York, April 7–August 18, 2019. Artwork © Alexandria Smith. Photo: Hai Zhang, courtesy Queens Museum
Closed
The Lure of the Dark
Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night
March 3, 2018–March 10, 2019
MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts
massmoca.org
For centuries, painters have been drawn to the mysteries and marvels of the night and its perceptual and poetic possibilities. This exhibition is about night and the light that illuminates the darkness. It features paintings that illustrate the ways in which the hours of darkness continue to provoke the contemporary imagination. Work by Cy Gavin and Alexandria Smith is included.
Installation view, The Lure of the Dark: Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night, MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, March 3, 2018–March 10, 2019. Artwork © Cy Gavin. Photo: David Dashiell