This mid-career survey featured eighty multimedia artworks created by the Californian assemblage artist Alexis Smith between 1971 and 1990. Heavily influenced by pop cultural icons and aesthetics, Smith was born Patricia Anne Smith and, at the age of seventeen, renamed herself after the pin-up girl and Hollywood star. Her meticulously crafted mixed-media collages combine images and themes from popular movies, advertisements, pulp fiction, and postcards in witty critiques of American culture, with an emphasis on Smith’s native Los Angeles. The latter showing included three additional large-scale installations and additional individual works.
Alexis Smith was organized by Richard Armstrong, Curator, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and adapted by Ann Goldstein, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.