Alexis Smith, artist with eclectic eye on American culture, dies at age 74
Alexis Smith, an artist who expressed a searing though affectionate vision of American culture in assemblages, installations and public art projects, died Jan. 2 at her home in Venice, California. She was 74.
Garth Greenan Gallery, which represented Smith in New York, confirmed her death. She got a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease in 2015.
In her art, Smith critiqued the American dream, but bittersweetly, with sympathy for those who chase it.
The installation “Isadora,” from 1980, demonstrates the tender way Smith could convey the flimsy immortality of fame. The work tells the story of the modern dancer Isadora Duncan's tragic final days in Nice, in the south of France. Two framed groups of pages — one shaped like a Greek temple, the other like the car in which Duncan died in 1927 when her long scarf wrapped around a spinning hubcap — pair lines of text with lone objects. The installation's introduction is a dried sea horse, the conclusion a ring of red hair. The collages hang on a breathtaking mountainous shore painted on the sort of corrugated strips of paper that decorate schoolrooms. A few white starfish add to a starry sky.
“I've made stuff out of everything,” Smith said in an oral history for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. “I mean, everything you can imagine.”
Smith trawled thrift stores and auctions for her materials. She devoured pulp novels, lowbrow films and tawdry magazines. Her work pivots on elegant juxtapositions between found images and literary quotations.
A series she called “Chandlerisms,” for example, is composed of letter-size collages that caption understated objects like tiny plastic coupe glasses or a fortune cookie fortune with brutally succinct typewritten extracts from Raymond Chandler's detective novels. “I felt terrible. I felt like an amputated leg,” reads “Chandlerism #30.” There's only one other element in the frame: a used-up book of matches.
Although steeped in Southern California, Smith was an expansively American artist, enthralled by people remaking themselves, in Hollywood or elsewhere “Out West,” to the point that, at 17, she took the name of a movie star: Alexis Smith.
“Her subject was really the culture of the United States, the culture that was in film and books, in advertising,” said painter Vija Celmins, a close friend and former teacher of Smith's. “A certain kind of, `I will be a winner.'”
Patricia Anne Smith was born in Los Angeles on Aug. 24, 1949. Her father, Dayrel Driver Smith, was a military surgeon, then a psychiatrist at Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk. The family lived on the hospital grounds until her mother, Lucille Lloyd Doak, a homemaker, died in 1961.
Smith studied at the University of California Irvine from 1967 to 1970. In her oral history, she called her choice of schools “the most propitious decision I ever made in my entire life.” There, she fell in with older artists like Celmins and minimalist Robert Irwin, as well as performance artist Chris Burden.
She was among the first wave of conceptual artists to establish themselves in Southern California, rather than in New York.
Her circle included conceptual artist John Baldessari and architect Frank Gehry, art critic Dave Hickey and poet Amy Gerstler. Video and performance artist Paul McCarthy said in an interview that he considers Smith's early one-off artist books — folios in a format similar to “Isadora” — equal to groundbreaking self-published artwork by Barbara T. Smith and Nancy Buchanan, and remembers Alexis Smith as being critical to the Los Angeles scene in the last quarter of the century.
She is survived by her husband, Scott Grieger, an artist and educator whom she married in 1990.
Smith taught for two decades at universities in the Los Angeles area and beyond, including several years at the University of California at Los Angeles. She was among a cohort of artists who founded the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1979.
Gradually, Smith developed a signature mode of combining framed collages and dramatic, handpainted murals, in which, as McCarthy put it, “The room becomes like the extension of the piece of paper.”