For the past fifteen years, Emily Mae Smith has brought her lush, humorous, and highly stylized sensibility to bear in one visually stunning canvas after another, artfully blending a Surrealist spirit with the flair of Pop Art and her own feminist aesthetic. Emily Mae Smith, the first standalone volume of the artist's work, provides a panoramic view of Smith's playful, illusionistic, and deeply intelligent oeuvre. With more than 250 illustrated pages, boasting over 150 full-color reproductions that bring Smith's crisp and exquisitely detailed paintings to life, the book takes a close look at her career to date.
Emily Mae Smith's images are supported by text contributions from Suzanne Hudson, Gabriela Rangel, and Jenni Sorkin that contextualize Smith's work and practice and illuminate her engagement with contemporary subjects like gender, violence, and capitalism -- all the while providing analyses of important compositions like her anthropomorphic broom series. Smith's sly figurations are perhaps best exemplified by this fey avatar, serving at once as a visual referent for the painter's brush, an emblem of women's domestic labor, and a playful embodiment of phallic forces. Emily Mae Smith takes readers on a journey through the artist's ferociously idiosyncratic vision, providing insight into one of the most startling and original bodies of work in contemporary art.
Hardcover, 240 pages
Emily Mae Smith was born in Austin, Texas in 1979 and received her MFA at Columbia University, New York and her BFA at the University of Texas, Austin, Texas. Smith's sly, humorous, and riveting compositions nod to art historical movements such as Symbolism and Art Nouveau, though with a distinctly 21st-century spin. Her genre-defying paintings speak through a vocabulary of signs and symbols addressing timely subjects including gender, class, and violence. Smith's paintings tackle art history's phallocentric myths and create imagery for subjectivities absent in visual culture, specifically the feminist perspective. Emily Mae Smith currently lives and works in New York.
Jenni Sorkin is Associate Professor of History of Art & Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She writes on the intersections between gender, material culture, and contemporary art, working primarily on women artists and underrepresented media. Her books include Live Form: Women, Ceramics and Community, Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women Artists, 1947-2016, Art in California, and numerous essays in journals and exhibition catalogs. She was educated at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Bard College, and received her PhD from Yale University. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Modern Craft.
Suzanne Hudson (PhD Princeton University) is Associate Professor of Art History and Fine Arts at the University of Southern California. An art historian and critic, Hudson's scholarly work has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), Dedalus Foundation, Creative Capital The Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others. She is also a regular contributor to Artforum and has written numerous essays for international exhibition catalogs and artist monographs. Recent books include Agnes Martin: Night Sea (Afterall/MIT, 2017) and Contemporary Painting (Thames & Hudson, 2021). She is currently at work on Better for the Making: Art, Therapy, Process, a study of the therapeutic origins of art-making within American modernism.
Gabriela Rangel is an independent curator, editor, and writer based in New York. Most recently she was artistic director of the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA). Prior to that she was visual arts director and chief curator at Americas Society from 2004 to 2019. She holds an MA in curatorial studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, an MA in media and communications studies from the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, Caracas, and a BA in film studies from the International Film School at San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba. She has worked at the Fundación Cinemateca Nacional and the Museo Alejandro Otero in Caracas, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions on modern and contemporary art that have included work by such artists as Carlos Cruz-Diez, Gordon Matta-Clark, GEGO, Arturo Herrera, José Leonilson, and Alejandro Xul Solar. She has written for Art in America, Parkett, and Art Nexus, edited numerous books, and contributed texts to such publications as Erick Meyenberg: D Major Isn't Blue (Museo Amparo, 2020); Lydia Cabrera: Between the Sum and the Parts (Americas Society/Koenig Books, London, 2019); Contesting Modernity: Informalism in Venezuela 1955-1975 (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2018); Marta Minujín (Ciudad de Buenos Aires, 2015); and A Principality of Its Own (Americas Society/Harvard University Press, 2006).
