MIMI SMITH: Breaking News
Art Basel Miami Beach | Survey Section, Booth S11
December 6-8, 2024
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce our participation in Art Basel Miami Beach 2024, Survey Section, Booth S11, with a solo presentation titled, MIMI SMITH: Breaking News, a survey of historic work by pioneering feminist artist Mimi Smith. The fair runs December 6-8, 2024 at the Miami Beach Convention Center.
MIMI SMITH: Breaking News focuses on the artist's series of rarely exhibited Television Drawings, which recorded live news broadcasts in the 1970s and 80s, along with a newscast performance video of the artist reading the news; a series of conceptual clocks that chronicle pressing issues throughout the 1980s and 90s; and a critical clothing sculpture installation that addresses women in the workplace and, by extension, women's rights (Smith is the first known artist to create clothing as sculpture in the 1960s). This presentation will also include a handmade book of original drawings—an elaboration of her Television Drawings series.
Smith’s use of relatable, everyday materials and personal narratives empowers her works to raise questions that expand beyond early feminist issues to social matters that are as prescient today as they were when she created the work. Exhibiting multiple series together, it becomes evident that Smith's works are layered and do not simply rest in satire. Smith's multi-disciplinary practice, using quotidian objects and vernacular language and performance—from clocks to conceptual uniforms to recorded rhetoric—draws out critical conversations on contemporary matters.
The Television Drawings encapsulate Smith's desire to relate her work to her life and ours. As a stay-at-home mother of two young children in the 1970s, she would often have the TV on in the background. She recalls, " I began to do these drawings because the constant information of the world invading my studio and home was not avoidable. However, I was still involved with the basic theory of relating my work to experiences in a society that are shared by many people.”
Smith’s Television Drawings were created before the advent of 24-hour news channels. Depicting daily morning, noon and evening news broadcasts as calligraphic stanzas, installations, audio works, and performances, her meticulous cursive transcripts documented such current events as the 1976 Ford-Carter presidential election, the Jonestown Massacre, Thanksgiving 1978 and Black Friday, a toxic spill at a New Jersey waste site, Princess Diana and Prince Charles’ wedding, Mia Farrow's divorce, a city bus accident, violence in America, the economy, weather, sports and a host of other daily stories.
Smith’s Clock Series presents an array of vintage wall clocks (like those found in schools and offices) with faces and hands that tally the urgency of pressing matters such as women’s rights, gender parity, the environment, AIDS, and gun violence. The clocks are augmented with paint, printed news clippings, and images collaged over the face, minutes and hours. Slave Ready: Corporate (1991-1993), Smith’s clothing sculpture installation, features a “dress for success" garment: a grey pinstripe suit edged in steel wool—a conceptual form of armor for women climbing the corporate ladder. To the right of the suit a wall clock reads “Just a Minute, Please” (as if women’s equity can wait), and on the left side, a computer Error Message painting exclaims “Slave Ready.” In the 1980s, Smith learned computer programming which inspired a series of paintings of computer error messages. This series critiques biases prevalent in the early "master-slave" computer-user language which was highly coded for inaccessibility.
Re-examined in the present moment, the works presented in MIMI SMITH: Breaking News poignantly critique notions of progress, illuminating critical matters that continue to be lightning rods in contemporary society. Smith's works ask us to consider the terms of everyday life and particularly their connection to women's experience. Her language is both wry and consequential, stimulating the viewer to question how public policies and private lives are interconnected.
Mimi Smith (b. 1942, Brookline, MA) received her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art in 1963 and her MFA from Rutgers University in 1966. Her work was included in the seminal exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007), curated by Connie Butler, has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and internationally at such institutions as the New Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; The Bronx Museum, NY; Mass MoCA, North Adams; Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, Paris; Hayward Gallery, London; and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, among others. Smith has been awarded a Joan Mitchell Grant, a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant. Smith's works are in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Getty, Los Angeles; Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; The Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, among others. Smith lives and works in New York City.
For further information, including images and previews, please contact Gallery Director, Brianna Bakke at 213-395-0762, or gallery@luisdejesus.com. Gallery Instagram: @luisdejesuslosangeles.
