MIMI SMITH

This exhibition marks Mimi Smith’s first major museum survey, featuring artworks made over sixty years. One of the most significant yet underrecognized artists practicing today, Smith’s influential career—spanning sculpture, drawing, painting, installation, artists' books, and performance—draws on her living history to address collective issues affecting women, from financial inequality and reproductive rights to the absence of supporting infrastructure for working mothers and gendered ageism. Her work also engages with broader dangers to humanity, including war, gun violence, environmental disaster, and global disease. Time is a recurring theme, appearing in various guises—from clocks and news-hour cycles to life’s chronologies. The exhibition will include important examples from major series since the 1960s to now; new, never exhibited, and rarely seen individual works and installations; as well as an archive of ephemera and publications.

As a graduate student at Rutgers University in the mid-1960s, Smith debuted her groundbreaking “clothing sculptures.” Dubbed by many as “pre-feminist,” these prophetic works merged fashion and craft with art and everyday life to scrutinize the ways in which clothing both defines and restricts a woman’s identity. In the early 1970s, she focused her attention on challenging women’s domestic confinement. As a young artist and mother with no studio and two children at home, Smith responded by turning the rooms in her house into material and content using measuring tape and knotted thread. Tacked to the wall, Smith’s life-size silhouettes of her kitchen and bedroom recast a named threat into a strategy of her own. Through the mid-1970s until the mid-1980s, Smith created drawings, books, installations, and performances that focused on televised news, anticipating a future of fragmented, polarized information. Her Error Message paintings from the late 1980s, reveal the bias and trauma of computer language, while the Clocks series, from the mid-1980s through the early 2000s, set off alarms about the gender wage gap, AIDS crisis, and ecological collapse. Begun in 1999 and ongoing, Smith’s Timelines revisit her early clothing sculptures, representing objects worn from infancy to old age to memorialize the perceived stages of a woman’s life.

The exhibition’s title, Dear Art, originates from a series of letters commenced by Smith in 1975 to an imaginary lover named “Art.” Affecting the tone of a romantic note or diary entry, Smith’s drawings reveal a life’s tipping points—the passion, worry, and disappointment felt over a six-decade vocation.

Mimi Smith: Dear Art, A Sixty-Year Survey is organized by the Museum’s Diana Bowes Chief Curator Amy Smith-Stewart. The exhibition will be accompanied by the artist’s first monograph with an essay by the exhibition’s curator.