b. 1981
Alexandria Smith is a mixed media artist based across London and New York. She was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1981. She received her BFA in Illustration from Syracuse University; MA in Art Education from New York University and MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons The New School for Design. Smith was co-organiser of the collective, Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter from 2016 – 2017. Her work addresses Black identity as informed by topics of memory, autobiography, myth and history. She combines figuration with abstraction to create characters that embody multiple states of being. Her figures are composed of limbs, eyes, breasts, and hair in distinctive configurations that embody physical, emotional, and metaphysical growth and transformation.
Smith has been awarded the Queens Museum/Jerome Foundation Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Grant, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship, the Virginia A. Myers Fellowship at the University of Iowa, the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship and more.
