Connecting the Dots

After shedding her anxieties, Willow Smith is ready to bare her transparent soul.

Mere days before the world went into lockdown, Willow Smith locked herself inside a 20-foot box at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art for 24 straight hours. She did so in the name of performance art, inviting guests to silently watch through a glass pane as she and her frequent musical collaborator, Tyler Cole, cycled through what they described as the “eight stages of anxiety.” For many, the COVID-19 pandemic will be remembered as a time when our collective mental health was shaken. But for the youngest child and only daughter of actors Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, the unheralded period of chaos that defined 2020 will stand out as the crucial time when she finally learned how to properly manage many aspects of her own anxieties.

Smith’s MoCA installation coincided with the release of an album with Cole, titled The Anxiety, and, like that 10-song effort, found the pair working through their respective histories with the disorder. The 20-year-old singer intended for the exhibition to raise awareness about anxiety; still, she had no idea how personally cathartic the experience would prove to be. Just over a year later, she reflects now on the day-long experience as “emotional turmoil.” The extended time in “the box,” as the face of Onitsuka Tiger describes it, forced her to confront some uncomfortable truths and emotions. But where she might have once been able to distract herself with any number of other diversions, the then-worsening pandemic—and the worldwide quarantine it mandated—left the newly-minted performance artist alone to wrestle with everything head-on.

“It was a crazy parallel,” says Smith, joking that she crawled out of a literal box only to immediately exchange it for a more symbolic one. But like many musicians before her, she used