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Artist Bio:
Mary Smith was born in Annapolis, Maryland and currently lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. She grew up a child of the Maryland Renaissance Festival, surrounded by artisans, craftsmen, and performers. She has traveled and lived throughout Europe, primarily in France where she received her BFA at Paris College of Art in 2019. She achieved her MFA at the LeRoy E Hoffberger School of Painting in 2023. 

Artist Statement:
2024
The visual artworks shift between painting and sculpture, form and window. Shapes define our physical world. I am interested in abstract shape experimentation as a way to access deep feeling, memory, and meditation. To create shapes, whether through drawing, painting, or sculpting, I use natural and local materials including earth, concrete, hand-made pigments, debris, and garbage. The forms of the shapes are created intuitionally, from dreams, and from memory. The shapes can be viewed as landscapes, figures, and/or objects.

2023
Procuring diverse feeling by avoiding absolutes. Disarming the viewer by generating ambivalent compositions, forms, and ground. The artwork is codependent to the viewer, welcoming them into a space of irresolution. Gathering raw materials from the pavements and earth of Baltimore to arrange a repository to use for pigments, surfaces, and tools to create paintings and drawings inherently attached to the locations they are made by the hands that made them. Reconditioning discarded, valueless materials into potential.

Meditation through grinding stones more than ancient into dust to use as pigment to build new forms.

The pieces are made on the floor where my hands feel the textures and layers, helping me decide how to push the material “limits” further. The “limits,” however, come from my own impeded, conditional will. The surface emerges from intuition-driven gestures that are worked and reworked to develop uneven, stimulating, rough surfaces. By rubbing, smearing, smashing, scraping, and then crusting into a rough, stiff, nearly stone body. The color, texture, weight, and pattern is determined by the dirt and time used to generate them. The ephemeral stone powder pigments are, finally, arranged on top. The materials are the source and means of a visual language in which to meditate on materiality, place, life, and betweenness.

CV:
Education

2023

MFA

LeRoy E Hoffberger School of Painting
directed by Joan Waltemath
assisted by Stephen Ellis

2019 

BFA

Paris College of Art

Awards

2023

Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower Fellowship, Baltimore, MD

2021

Merit Scholarship Award, LeRoy E Hoffberger School of Painting

Exhibitions
Solo Shows

2024

GroundWork

Arnold’s Gallery, Baltimore MD

2023

SPACEARRANGE

Gateway Gallery, Baltimore MD

2020

Night Walks

Pattern Interrupt Gallery, Baltimore MD

2019

Observation 1

Bastille Design Center, Paris, France

Group Shows

2023

Faculty Show

Meyers Briggs Gallery, MICA, Baltimore MD

2023

Phat of the Land

Arnold’s Gallery, Baltimore MD

2023

Gallows Humor

Maurice Projects, Baltimore MD

2023

Constellations

The Peale Museum, LeRoy E Hoffberger School of Painting, Baltimore MD

2023

Garden Walk

World Public Space Gallery, Baltimore MD

2023

Park Place

World Public Space Gallery, Baltimore MD

2022

We Are Not Similar

Pinkard Gallery, Baltimore MD

2021

Eyes In The Light

Pinkard Gallery, Baltimore MD

2018

Pigeon View

Espace 15, Paris, France

2018

Spring Ending

Espace 15, Paris, France

2015

Student Art Show

Katzen Arts Center, Washington DC