Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | Art Journal

Unbaled: an interview with Shinique Smith.

Article Excerpt
Shinique Smith has been crossing the boundaries of sculpture, painting, and site-specific installations in her art since she started making it in her teens. The Brooklyn-based artist received a BFA in 1992 and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in her hometown of Baltimore in 2003. In the last year and a half, her colorful bundles of discarded clothing, and abstract wall installations that often include objects hanging or spilling into the viewer's space, have been featured in over fifteen exhibitions across the country and abroad, from P.S. I in New York to Schola dell'Arte dei Tiraoro e Battiloro in Venice. One of her sculptures was also included in Frequency at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2006. Most recently. Smith's mixed-media works have appeared in Recognize! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery, in Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century at the New Museum, and at the Moti Hasson Gallery in New York. She is represented by Yvon Lambert Gallery in New York.

The tactility of her Bale Variants series and the luscious calligraphic marks she makes with everything from paint to bleach, give her work an alluring, seductive, material density. The desire to limn each layer of her complex constructions draws one closer to her compositions, to linger and even get lost in them. Is that really a denim canvas? Is that Kufic script or an elegant piece of graffiti, or both? Trained as a painter and with the skill and patience of a pointilltst, Smith uses large, bold compo--sitions to draw her audience into her installations, which offer a payoff worthy of Seurat himself. The collages of found materials and assertive marks provide an almost endless hunt for the spot where a piece of black lace may end and a thick, gestural line of paint may begin, or where a strip of gingham may attach to gauze, creating the...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!