Alexis Smith, an artist who expressed a searing although affectionate imaginative and prescient of American tradition in assemblages, installations and public artwork tasks, died on Tuesday at her residence in Venice, Calif. She was 74.
Garth Greenan Gallery in New York, which represents her property, confirmed her demise. Ms. Smith was identified with Alzheimer’s illness in 2015.
In her artwork, Ms. Smith critiqued the American Dream, however bittersweetly, with sympathy for individuals who chase it.
The set up “Isadora,” from 1980, demonstrates the tender method Smith might convey the flimsy immortality of fame. The work tells the story of the fashionable dancer Isadora Duncan’s tragic last days in Good, within the south of France. Two framed teams of pages — one formed like a Greek temple, the opposite just like the automotive by which Duncan died in 1927 when her lengthy scarf wrapped round a spinning hubcap — pair strains of textual content with lone objects. The set up’s introduction is a dried seahorse, the conclusion a hoop of purple hair. The collages grasp on a wide ranging mountainous shore painted on the form of corrugated strips of paper that enhance schoolrooms. Just a few white starfish add to a starry sky.
“I’ve made stuff out of all the things,” Ms. Smith stated in an oral historical past for the Smithsonian Archives of American Artwork. “I imply, all the things you may think about.”
Smith trawled thrift shops and auctions for her supplies. She devoured pulp novels, lowbrow movies and tawdry magazines. Her work pivots on elegant juxtapositions between discovered pictures and literary quotations.
A collection she referred to as “Chandlerisms,” for instance, consists 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 horrible. I felt like an amputated leg,” reads “Chandlerism #30.” There’s just one different component within the body: a used-up e book of matches.
Though steeped in Southern California, Ms. Smith was an expansively American artist, enthralled by individuals remaking themselves, in Hollywood or elsewhere “Out West,” to the purpose that, at 17, she took the identify of a film star: Alexis Smith.
“Her topic was actually the tradition of america, the tradition that was in movie and books, in promoting,” stated the painter Vija Celmins, a detailed good friend and former instructor of Ms. Smith’s. “A sure type of, ‘I might be a winner.’”
Patricia Anne Smith was born in Los Angeles on Aug. 24, 1949. Her father, Dayrel Driver Smith, was a army surgeon, then a psychiatrist at Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk, Calif. The household lived on the hospital grounds till her mom, Lucille Lloyd Doak, a homemaker, died in 1961.
Ms. Smith studied on the College of California Irvine from 1967 to 1970. In her oral historical past, she referred to as her selection of colleges “probably the most propitious choice I ever made in my whole life.” There, she fell in with older artists like Ms. Celmins and the minimalist Robert Irwin, in addition to the efficiency artist Chris Burden.
She was among the many first wave of conceptual artists to determine themselves in Southern California, fairly than in New York.
Her circle included the conceptual artist John Baldessari and the architect Frank Gehry, the artwork critic Dave Hickey and the poet Amy Gerstler. The video and efficiency artist Paul McCarthy stated in an interview that he considers Ms. Smith’s early one-off artist books — folios in a format
much like “Isadora” — equal to groundbreaking self-published paintings by Barbara T. Smith and Nancy Buchanan, and remembers Alexis Smith as being essential to the Los Angeles scene within the final quarter of the century.
She is survived by her husband, Scott Grieger, an artist and educator whom she married in 1990.
Ms. Smith taught for 20 years at universities within the Los Angeles space and past, together with a number of years on the College of California at Los Angeles. She was amongst a cohort of artists who based the Museum of Up to date Artwork in Los Angeles in 1979.
Progressively, Ms. Smith developed a signature mode of mixing framed collages and dramatic, hand-painted murals, by which, as Mr. McCarthy put it, “The room turns into just like the extension of the piece of paper.”
One landmark set up, “Identical Outdated Paradise,” was commissioned by the Brooklyn Museum in 1987 and is now on view within the Stuart Assortment on the College of California San Diego. It’s a wide-angle mural within the model of a Hollywood backdrop depicting mountains, orange bushes and a menacing snake that’s marked like a two-lane freeway. A row of zoomed-in industrial pictures framed in weather-beaten wooden bear strains from Jack Kerouac’s “On the Highway” and punning objects, like toy arrows jutting into house. The temper invokes John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” and Roman Polanski’s 1974 film “Chinatown.”
Ms. Smith had a midcareer retrospective on the Whitney Museum of American Artwork in New York in 1991. Throughout the next decade, she accomplished a string of main public commissions. She designed dazzling terrazzo flooring on the Los Angeles Conference Heart — one exhibits the night time sky, the opposite a projection of the globe centered on the Pacific Rim — and at a stadium at Ohio State College.
On the College of California San Diego, “Snake Path,” a serpentine walkway with scales of slate, winds 560 ft previous a miniature Backyard of Eden and ends on the college’s library — one other parable of private transformation sweetened by forbidden data.
Though Ms. Smith had stated that she didn’t contemplate her work feminist in theme, she shot sly appears to be like at well-liked portrayals of girls all through her profession. In 2007, her work was included within the history-making survey “WACK! Artwork and the Feminist Revolution,” which opened on the Museum of Up to date Artwork and traveled to the Nationwide Museum of Ladies within the Arts in Washington and the PS1 Up to date Artwork Heart (now MoMA PS1) in Queens.
Her subsequent main retrospective, “The American Approach,” on the Museum of Up to date Artwork San Diego in 2022, launched Ms. Smith to a brand new viewers. “I used to be struck by the seriousness with which she handled humor and the on a regular basis,” Anthony Graham, who curated the present when he was 30, stated in an interview. “She took issues that had been neglected and atypical and drew out the issues that made them particular.”
The San Diego present recovered from years in storage Ms. Smith’s 2001 set up “Purple Carpet,” which pokes enjoyable at Hollywood’s theatrical glitz however retains its grandeur. The work contains a monumental serape rug resulting in a mural of a sundown, with all-caps textual content on the wall: “Heaven for climate. Hell for firm.”
Ms. Smith additionally made a companion work: a panoramic silkscreen print with a serape sample the colours of a black mesa and a burning sky. The phrase working above it might have been Smith’s motto: “Nothing Is New Besides What Has Been Forgotten.”
