Southern California artist Alexis Smith handed away on the age of 74 on Tuesday.
Smith was lauded for the wit with which she mined popular culture, Hollywood and the American West for her collage work — usually at large scale. She’d pair discovered imagery, texts and objects set towards shocking framings and installations — memes lengthy earlier than her time.
“She emerged at a time when a technology of artists who had been fueled by the concepts of conceptualism and pop artwork had been simply coming into maturity,” mentioned the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego’s director and CEO, Kathryn Kanjo. “We can take into consideration artists like John Baldessari or Ed Ruscha, with whom Alexis Smith would stand shoulder to shoulder. And I believe that, like these three artists collectively, we will see a selected sort of dry wit that we take into consideration as explicit to Southern California pop.”
But, domestically, her best-known work would possibly simply be a footpath.
Smith’s “Snake Path” is a part of the UC San Diego Stuart Art Collection, winding up a hillside in direction of the college’s iconic Geisel Library. Installed in 1992, it is a 560-foot-long, 10-foot-wide rendering of a serpent constructed from massive, mosaic slate tiles, and it is seen even from Google Maps.
The imagery of the serpent, an enormous “Paradise Lost” e book sculpture representing data and the miniature Eden-like backyard on the prime all draw on concepts of innocence versus data — and the way these ideas play out on a college campus.
Students, employees and guests walk straight on the snake to and from class or research periods on the library.
Courtesy of the Stuart Collection
Mathieu Gregoire has labored with UC San Diego’s Stuart Art Collection because the Eighties and labored with Smith to convey “Snake Path” to fruition within the late ’80s and early ’90s. He mentioned the work additionally represented a turning level for the Stuart Collection, an unparalleled assortment of public artwork.
Courtesy of the Stuart Collection
“This was the primary work within the Stuart Collection that was utterly embedded in not simply the bodily panorama, but in addition the useful panorama, as a result of it is a pathway,” Gregoire mentioned.
Other works have since been equally constructed and functionally interwoven into the campus, together with Ann Hamilton’s “KAHNOP • TO TELL A STORY,” a 2023 pathway inscribed with language.
“This was the primary to try this, to actually unfold itself out to not be an object in a panorama, however to actually embed itself throughout the panorama,” Gregoire mentioned.
In a panel dialogue with John Baldessari, Robert Irwin and others concerning the Stuart Art Collection recorded by UCTV over a decade in the past, Smith mentioned there was one essential distinction between public artwork and museum artwork.
“It’s not the artwork that is totally different, it is the viewers that is totally different.”
— Alexis Smith on public artwork
“One of the issues that is totally different about public artwork, and also you see it on this assortment significantly, is that it is not the artwork that is totally different, it is the viewers that is totally different,” Smith mentioned.
“Because once you put one thing in a museum or gallery, the viewers is the individuals who know that it is there and select to go see it. And once you put one thing out on this planet, you get everyone. And they did not precisely, essentially wish to see it or select to see it or know something about artwork or know something about artists,” she mentioned. “The artwork actually has to talk for itself in that scenario.”
Smith additionally has one other work within the Stuart Collection — the one artist to have two items within the assortment. Her large mural “Same Old Paradise” was initially put in briefly on the Brooklyn Museum in 1987. The piece served because the inspiration for her “Snake Path,” so it brings her artistic work full circle.
Smith was recognized with Alzheimer’s in 2015. By the time the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego held a serious survey exhibition of her work in 2022, she had been residing with Alzheimer’s for seven years. The exhibition, “The American Way,” curated by Anthony Graham, celebrated Smith’s many a long time of labor.
“There’s a very sturdy curiosity in personas all through her work, and the sort of crafting of self,” Graham informed KPBS in 2022. “It’s one of many causes that she’s actually seeking to these concepts of old Hollywood, this delusion that the woman subsequent door, the boy subsequent door, might head west, arrive in Hollywood and make it on the silver display and develop into a star. That turns into a very clear instance for her of what she sees as a very American ethos of self-invention and self-reinvention.”
The exhibit was astonishing and critically acclaimed, whereas additionally being a pleasure to browse with or with no vital eye. Smith’s work is pleasant, thought-provoking and intensely observant.
“She faucets one thing acquainted in us — we reply to it, after which we one way or the other personalize it.”
— Kathryn Kanjo, MCASD
“She faucets one thing acquainted in us — we reply to it, after which we one way or the other personalize it. I believe that she opens this stuff as much as our personal interpretation. She’s not giving us one straight reply, however she’s giving us an area to step in and ask our personal questions,” Kanjo mentioned.
In addition to the the works at UC San Diego, MCASD has practically a dozen of Smith’s artworks in its everlasting assortment — and two presently on view: “Niagara,” a now-unsettling concrete tombstone within the sculpture backyard, and “Montage of Disasters,” a collage piece.
“Alexis was brave and she or he had this extraordinary tenacity,” Gregoire mentioned. “She was utterly an unique. She did not match into any explicit ‘isms’ or art-historical straightforward explanations. She was utterly herself. She was utterly of this place, of Southern California.”
