Mixed media and collage on board, 2014. 508x419 mm; 20x16½ inches. Signed, titled and dated "09/14" in ink, verso.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection, Pennsylvania (2014).
Thick as Thieves is an engaging early work from artist and educator, Alexandria Smith. Inspired by Claymation, Indian and Persian miniatures, and Baroque textiles, Smith fuses elements of history and middle-class domesticity to question traditional roles of identity, gender, and sexuality. Working in a space between nostalgia and grotesque misfortune—evoking the complex experiences of Black women in the contemporary age, the characters are on a quest for self and engage in "play" amidst sparse and symbolic spaces.
A native of the Bronx, Smith earned her BFA in illustration from Syracuse University, New York, her MA in art education from New York University and a MFA from Parsons School of Design, New School, New York. From 2017 through 2018, she served as co-organizer of the collective Black Women Artists for Black Lives. She lives and works in New York and is Assistant Professor in painting and printmaking and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut.
In 2022, she installed Memoirs of a Ghost Girlhood: a Black Girl's Window at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, based in part on the artist's research into Black history in the state. As a recipient of the 2018–19 Queens Museum/Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists, Smith created Monuments to an Effigy, 2019, her first museum solo exhibition and an installation inspired by her research into the Olde Towne of Flushing Burial Ground and the Macedonia African Methodist Episcopal Church in Flushing, Queens—a historic hub of the African American community.
Consigned to support the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation.
