Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Shinique Smith now lives and works in upstate New York. Her work is inspired by the vast nature of “things” that we consume and discard, which resonate on a personal and social scale. The graffiti of her youth, Japanese calligraphy, and abstraction are influences from which she extracts “the graceful and spiritual qualities in written word and the everyday.” Smith's work has also been widely exhibited at prestigious venues such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Brooklyn Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Wisconsin, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, the New Museum in New York, MoMA PS1 in New York, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. Smith earned her BFA (1992) and MFA (2003) from the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she now serves on the Board of Trustees, and her master's degree in teaching (2000) from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University, both in Massachusetts.
Portrait of the artist. Photo by Eric Wolfe.