Alexandria Smith

Alexandria Smith is mixed media visual artist and co-organiser of the collective, Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter 2016–2017. Through a regenerative collage process, Alexandria Smith creates paintings, drawings, and installations defined by a unique relationship to the body and responsive to notions of cultural difference.

Smith was born in Bronx, New York and lives in London, England where she is the head of painting at the Royal Academy of Art.  Previously, she was Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Printmaking at the University of Iowa from 2015–16.  She also served as Visiting Critic at Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt) and SMFA. Smith earned her MFA in Painting and Drawing from Parsons The New School for Design, MA in Art Eductation from New York University, and BFA in Illustration from Syracuse University.  Smith is the recipient of numerous awards including the Queens Museum/Jerome Foundation Fellowship (2018/19), Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Virginia A. Myers Fellowship at the University of Iowa, and the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship (2013-2015). She has been awarded residencies at the Fountainhead Residency, MacDowell Colony, Bemis Center, Yaddo, the LMCC Process Space Residency, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. From 2016-18,  While co-organizing the collective, Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter (BWA for BLM,  the collective mounted artistic interventions at the New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and Project Row Houses. Smith’s recent solo exhibitions include “A Litany for Survival” at Boston University (2018). Her recent group exhibitions include "The Lure of the Dark: Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night" at Mass MoCA (2019); the inaugural Wanda D. Ewing Commission and Solo Exhibition at The Union for Contemporary Art in Omaha, NE (2017); “Black Pulp,” which traveled to Yale University, International Print Center NY (IPCNY), USF Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa, FL, Wesleyan University, and the African American Museum in Philadelphia (2016-18); and a commission for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library (2015). In 2019 Smith will mount a new site-specific installation for the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum Biennial as well as her first solo museum exhibition, “Monuments to an Effigy” at the Queens Museum