Alexandria Smith

Alexandria Smith is a mixed media visual artist based in London and New York. She earned her BFA in Illustration from Syracuse University; MA in Art Education from New York University; and MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons The New School for Design. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Queens Museum/Jerome Foundation Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Grant, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship, the Virginia A. Myers Fellowship at the University of Iowa and the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. She has been awarded residencies including MacDowell, Bemis, Yaddo and LMCC Process Space. Smith's recent exhibitions include her first solo museum exhibit, Monuments to an Effigy at the Queens Museum in NYC and a site-specific commission for the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in 2019. Alexandria currently has a solo exhibit, “Memoirs of a Ghost Girlhood: a Black Girl’s Window on view at the Currier Museum of Art (NH) and recently had a solo exhibit, “Pretend Gravitas and Dream Aborted Givens” at Gagosian Park and 75 (NYC). Alexandria is currently Head of Painting at the Royal College of Art in London.

Alexandria reflects on her work…

My work interweaves memory, autobiography and history to explore girlhood experiences that culminate in the complexities of Black identity and its relationship to the body. Flatly painted images, often symmetrical and at times collaged, show two mirrored figures, heads or other more amorphous semi-abstract shapes that embody a state of duality and call into question the stability of identity, while simultaneously evoking stability through that same use of repetition. My characters embody multiple states of being as manifestations of hybridity and duality, that simultaneously challenge heteronormative gender roles, allude to a divided self, and underscore the complex realities of humanity.

 Surrealism, magical realism, animation and humor are filtered through my own mythology: a cast of characters, symbols and landscapes that have developed in my work over the past ten years. I use the languages of printmaking and painting and the engagement of my body, as a conceptual and technical approach to explore the pictorial language of transformation. The work is both trickster and conjurer, mirroring the ways in which we view ourselves and others in the present while simultaneously envisioning a future.

Drawing is and always has been an integral part of my practice. Over the past year, I exclusively turned to drawing as a way to tap into my subconscious and record my ideas. The intuitive and automatic nature of drawing results in an energy uniquely different than painting. The new body of drawings depicts the body in space, reflective, pensive and in flux (physically, emotionally and spiritually).