FULL-ON!

Inspired by gestures of wrapping and marking and the resourcefulness of urban dwellers to create imaginative worlds from leftover materials found on the street, New York based artist Shinique Smith’s installations bridge the boundaries between painting and sculpture. She draws on hip hop music, graffiti, calligraphy and her ancestral ties to her South Pacific ancestry, and seeks to refine and distill these elements into a spiritual language. Her work deals with the cross sections of subcultures, the utilization of items from popular culture to reach a higher aesthetic, and the blurring of boundaries. In this installation she will be using items ranging from cut carpets to bound clothing to create FULL-ON effects.  Smith has exhibited widely at venues including the studio museum of Harlem.

Smith’s residency at BMoCA, has been funded in part by a grant from the Boulder Arts Commission.  She will also be one of the visiting artists in BMoCA’s newly introduced Young Artists at Work program.