By Sarah Cascone

Is it finally time for Mimi Smith to get her due? The 82-year-old feminist artist’s mini retrospective at Art Basel Miami Beach with Luis De Jesus Los Angeles fittingly features a suite of sculptures made from clocks, with references to pressing social issues added to each hour.

By Maximilíano Durón

Mimi Smith, an artist associated with the feminist movement of the 1970s, offers one of the most striking showings in the Survey section, for historical presentations. On view are several of her “Television Drawings,” dense transcriptions of the morning and evening news broadcasts from the 1970s and ’80s that are framed within renderings of TV sets from the era. 

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles presents Mimi Smith’s first West Coast solo exhibition, “Head-On,” which includes sculptures, paintings, and drawings that span the pioneering artist’s six-decade career. Predating the feminist art movement of the 1970s, Smith’s bold work excavated the nature of womanhood and domesticity before it was popular. 

Mimi Smith has spent a lifetime making art that integrates her personal life with the tumult and beauty of the surrounding world. Over the past fifty years, Smith has been making artwork as an archive of our struggle to survive and maintain our humanity, addressing the environment, nuclear war, AIDS, terrorism and feminism (before the word was commonly used) in compelling mixed media works, which she considers sculptures. 

 For the past three years, Mimi Smith (pronounced Mim-ee) has been part of the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Create A Living Legacy (CALL) Initiative, working with legacy specialists Allison Schooler, Catherine Czacki, and Denise Schatz to collect information on the artist’s personal archive of artwork and documentation. This project has resulted in an active database of the artist’s works, one that links information and images of her extensive inventory of drawings, installations, and sculptures with the physical location of those pieces in the artist’s studio. 

Mimi Smith says of her art, “I consider my work to be feminist, social, and conceptual, sculpture and drawing. Although my earliest work from the ‘60s was feminist in both a personal and political sense, there was no available vocabulary for it at the time and it often was misunderstood when I first made it. The word feminism was not a word in my own vocabulary until the early ‘70s, and then its ideas and actions inspired me with hopes and ambitions for things I had not previously imagined or even considered.”

Mimi Smith is a really interesting artist who probably isn’t as well-known as she deserves to be. She started working in the 60’s, and she actually made this dress for herself when she was pregnant, which is kind of amazing. At the time, women’s maternity dresses were very different than they are today; most of them were very full, flowing, they had Peter Pan collars. The idea was to obscure that you were pregnant, basically, as opposed to today, where you see women with very form-fitting maternity clothes. It’s prescient in the sense that here she has placed a clear bubble over the area where the baby is, so that she’s really drawing attention to it and saying, “There’s a baby in here; I want you to see it.”

Chatting with Smith, who’s soft-spoken and self-deprecating, is congruent to the experience of her artwork; her creations, unassuming at a glance, have a sharp undercurrent of ferocity and critique. Smith is best known for her ‘clothing art’ produced during the sixties, the exemplar being “Steel Wool Peignoir” (1966), a negligee comprised of steel wool and lace, a brutal deflation of marital romance vis-à-vis domestic drudgery. 

Smith's and Bee's art makes us laugh at the idiocy (the fears and myths) informing the male homosocial codes legislating women's repression, while asserting a feminist blockage of the conventional male humor perpetuating the history of women's persecution and enforcing a code of female homosocial norms in sync with male supremacy.

NJCU is currently displaying artwork by Mimi Smith, an acclaimed artist that has been doing artwork since the 60s, which was later categorized as “Feminist Art.” The name of the show is named “Constructing Art About Life.”

Like a fierce but soft-spoken warrior who reveals our foibles rather than causing us harm, artist Mimi Smith (b. 1942) has spent more than four decades creating objects that interrogate the pressing social and political concerns of our time, from women’s work and social conformity to nuclear holocaust, without flinching, and with a focused gaze. From her pioneering signature clothing sculptures to installations, artist books, and readings from the evening news, Mimi Smith uses what is around her in both intimate and prescient ways, connecting our daily lives to the important, difficult and sometimes life-threatening issues of our era. But despite the exquisite clarity of her work’s incisive merging of form and concept, her art has not always been adequately understood.

Mimi Smith is best known for her clothing pieces made in the early 60s. Steel Wool Peignoir (1966), a see-through dressing gown luxuriously trimmed with thick rolls of steel wool and lace, was an early example of a literalist form of slapstick humour deployed by Feminist artists of the 70s. So too was Maternity Dress (1966), a silver-vinyl micro-mini worthy of Edie Sedgwick, complete with a see-through plastic moulded dome that fits over the belly. Although both works provoke a kind of dopey, out-loud laughter, responses to them provided early indications of social analyses of Feminist art. 

The retrospective exhibition of the fabric art of Mimi Smith at the Anna Kustera Gallery in New York last year received critical acclaim in the press. Smiths seminal sixties clothing sculptures garnered the most notice. "Her interest in how clothes relate to a woman's pysche has become the theme of many younger women artists' work, but Ms. Smiths wry approach to the subject is still very much her own," wrote Grace Glueck in The New York Times. 

Mimi Smith's art seems to function as a shield, not only for the absent bodies it evokes, but against some of Smith’s deep-seated rage. Her sculptures can be seen as a series of responses, a wry acknowledgment of pressing issues. As if in anticipation of an atomic blast, Smith recently stitched up a group of handy coverings for the postnuclear body: steel-wool mask, chaps, and wigs. Medications for breast cancer patients have been tooled into sexy undergarments. Taken one body of work at a time, Smith’s art may seem to lack the continuity on which commercial success depends, but this collective debut showed that it has never lacked bite.

Light-handedly exploring domestic and other issues for some 30 years, Mimi Smith has transformed clothes, clocks, computer-screen images, furniture and other everyday objects into things that tweak the psyche.

“Steel Wool Politics,” the title of the Mimi Smith (b. 1942) retrospective at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art, inevitably conjures up the image of one of Smith’s best known works, Steel Wool Peignoir (1966; Fig. 1). Made 30 years ago, the garment is constructed of sheer pink nylon and eggshell laced edged with thick furry bands of steel wool. The frothy wire looks dainty and rich enough to ornament an elegant boudoir garment, but steel wool discourages intimacy as it suggests an inappropriate “feminine” context: not the fantasy bedroom but the work-a-day kitchen.

It seems to be standard practice in our technological culture to perceive politics and daily life as separate and unrelated aspects of society, and thus to abstract large social issues from the effect they have on personal existence. But I’ve noticed that since the advent of the women’s movement, thanks to feminist research in this direction, more and more people have recognized that such a schism is unrealistic, and have begun to explore—through artistic and other means—the ways in which public policies and private lives are interconnected. The artist Mimi Smith is one such person; these connections are the subject of her installation House with Clouds.