Allison Smith (artist)

Allison Smith (born 1972 in Manassas, Virginia) is an American artist who is based in Oakland, California.^[1] Smith has exhibited her work professionally since 1995 throughout the United States and in England, France, Germany, Spain, New Zealand, and South Korea. She has produced over twenty-five solo exhibitions, installations, performances, and artist-led participatory projects for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Public Art Fund, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum,^[2] Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, The Arts Club of Chicago, and Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Education and early career

Smith received a BA in psychology from The New School for Social Research, a BFA in fine arts from Parsons School of Design, and an MFA in sculpture from the Yale University School of Art. She also participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. She lived in New York City from 1990 until 2008 when she relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area to join the faculty of California College of the Arts, where she is a tenured professor and Chair of the Sculpture Program.

Career

Allison Smith has exhibited her work professionally since 1995 throughout the United States and in England, France, Germany, Spain, New Zealand, and South Korea. She has produced over twenty-five solo exhibitions, installations, performances, and artist-led participatory projects for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Public Art Fund,^[3] The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum,^[2] Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Berkeley Art Museum,^[3] The Arts Club of Chicago,^[2] and Indianapolis Museum of Art.

She has exhibited her work in over one hundred group exhibitions at galleries and museums including P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center at the Museum of Modern Art New York, Palais de Tokyo, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Andy Warhol Museum, The Mattress Factory, and The Tang Museum.

Smith has lectured on her work extensively at art schools and research universities in the United States and abroad, as well as at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SculptureCenter and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

Her work has been featured and reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Sculpture, on NPR, KQED, Art:21, and in many other media and scholarly publications. Smith has received generous support from United States Artists, Arts Council England, For-Site Foundation, Creative Work Fund, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Artadia, and New York Foundation for the Arts. Notable residencies include IASPIS (Stockholm, Sweden [upcoming]), The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, the Museum of Modern Art Artists Experiment initiative, the International Studio and Curatorial Program in Brooklyn, New York, Artpace San Antonio, Texas,^[3] and Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California.

Smith's work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Saatchi Gallery London^[3] and other public and private collections worldwide. Smith is represented by Haines Gallery in San Francisco.

Criticism

Her piece about Civil War reenactments, The Muster, has been criticized for ignoring racial issues,^[4] a central theme in that war.

References

Sources

New York Times, By MARTHA SCHWENDENERJUNE 7, 2013; Fifes and Drums as Performance Art A Review of ‘Allison Smith: Rudiments of Fife and Drum,’ at the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield

External links

• Official website