Virtual Visiting Artist, Alexandria Smith will give a virtual artist talk on Friday, October 27, at 2:00 pm ET. This event is free and open to the public.

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. Smith was a public and charter school art teacher in Harlem and the South Bronx for a decade. This expertise led to her involvement as co-organizer of the collective Black Women Artists for Black Lives from 2017 through 2018. She lives and works in New York and London, where she heads the painting program at the Royal College of Art.

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 church 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 Gagosian, 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 incorporated wallpaper, paintings, found objects, and sculpture, with an original site-specific sound composition by Gre.

Event Info

Jan 1, 2025, 7:30 to 9 PM

Jan 3, 2025, 6 PM

Jan 5, 2025