GWEN SMITH

"Hey, Hey What Can I Do (me on 7 mile beach at 21 and selfies from Selfies wearing Black clothes lining the uterus, a cow from Nevis Road as the anus)", 2021

Gouache, photographic reproductions, and adhesive on paper

24 x 18 inches (73.7 x 58.4 cm) 

Courtesy of the Artist

Selected by Matthew Deleget 

Gwen Smith (b. 1968) lives and works in Long Island City, New York. She received a BA from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1990 and moved to New York in 1991 to pursue photography. In 1992 Smith became a Photography Research Editor for COLORS, and spent the next decade at Vogue and The New Yorker.  In 2004 Smith stopped her editorial career to pursue motherhood and raise her son River in collaboration with her partner Haim Steinbach.

After Smith self published her artist’s books The Black Woman Project (Vol 1 & 2) in 2020,  Justine Kurland helped jettison an awareness of Smith as one of the most relevant artists of her generation by granting her an exhibition - ORIGIN- at her studio in the fall of 2021. Smith received a Rauschenberg Emergency Grant in 2021 and was a 2021-22 Artist in Residence at The Center for Book Arts in NYC. In 2022-2023 Smith was a Baxter Street Artist in Residence and the inaugural artist in residence at Residency on the Rock, 7|G Foundation and a participant at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2023. 

Smith has exhibited worldwide including at MoMA PS1; the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA; Castelli Gallery, NY; Lia Rumma Gallery, Naples Italy, Huxley Parlour, London, Baxter Street CCNY (solo) and Dominique Gallery in Los Angeles.