Shinique Smith, Bale Variant no.0006, 2005. Clothing, twine, wood. 6 x 4.5 x 4.5 feet.

Twenty years ago, Shinique Smith (Master of Arts in Teaching in Art Education ’00) was a rowdy teenage graffiti “tagger” roaming the streets of Baltimore, “using the city,” Smith says, “as a playground.” The painter and sculptor, now based in Brooklyn, still finds inspiration in the urban landscape: in architecture, in the clothes people wear, even in the trash she sees on the street. Those magazines tied up for recycling? That bundle of old clothes headed for the dump? “There’s a random beauty there,” Smith says.
 
Smith’s unconventional muses can also be mapped back to her unconventional mother, a spiritual-minded fashion editor who took her daughter first to fabric stores and fashion shows, then to meditation circles and sweat lodges. As an undergraduate, Smith designed clothes, made videos “of myself doing weird things,” explored pop art and Japanese calligraphy, and began to realize that her tagging days weren’t quite over.

Now seen in galleries in New York and across the country, Smith’s artwork is graffiti verging on the calligraphy she studied in college. Her fluid strokes are both forceful and ethereal, chaotic yet contained. The words are, for the most part, illegible, although as she is writing and painting, Smith repeats them to herself “like a mantra,” she says. “It’s like meditation.” Some pieces explode off the wall into wild, three-dimensional tangles of cut paper; others incorporate Smith’s street-trash idea, with tightly bound bundles of old clothes and other textiles.

While the bundling signals a relatively new direction in Smith’s work—she started “tying stuff up” two years ago—its roots might actually go deeper. “I was going through some of my old stuff, and I found a drawing I did in 1990, of myself, tied up,” Smith says. “Sometimes you have to step away from an idea for it to come together in the right way.”

Currently Smith’s work can be seen in Frequency at The Studio Museum in Harlem, through March 12, 2006.