Shinique Smith's Street Art, Taking the High Road

Smith cites a friend's interpretation of the installation as the kind of sentimental Wall of Fame a teenage girl might mount in her bedroom, pinning up the pop-culture faces that mean the most to her. That teenager may have more in common with the spray-painting Shinique Smith of then, a young rebel in public school in Baltimore, than with the mature artist she's become since getting her master's degree and moving to New York in 2003. (Just weeks ago, she got taken on by the rich and prestigious Yvon Lambert gallery. That almost makes her part of the art-world establishment.)

Smith notes links between her roots in graffiti and the Japanese calligraphy she's come to more recently: Both are about marks made in a single swoop of spontaneity, as well as the impossibility of erasure. Both are governed by strict traditions that set clear bounds for any innovation. But both also have parallels in the grand, Dead White Male history of Western art that also matters deeply to Smith -- in the revolutionary sketches of Leonardo and Michelangelo, in abstract expressionism, maybe also in the subtle use of black and white and gesture by more recent figures such as Cy Twombly and Sol LeWitt.

Smith says that she is, proudly and definitively, black, and a black artist, and a black woman artist: "I think in this country, you can't not see yourself as an African American, or as a woman." She revels in her "freakish" resemblance to Josephine Baker, to the point of wearing her hair in a 1920s bob and dressing for a critic's visit in a striped French matelot shirt.

During the seven-year break between her bachelor's and master's degrees in art at the Maryland Institute, she lived for some time in Seattle. She found that city strangely lacking in African American consciousness and culture, she says, and so came to launch its first black film festival. She is keenly aware of all the black friends and role models she has found in New York's art community. "I feel like I'm part of some renaissance," she says, "but maybe that's just me."

She also insists, however, that blackness is not -- or not usually -- the "primary subject" of her work. "I see myself as an artist -- other people see me as an African American artist." By which she means that however much she may be an artist who is black, her work isn't simply "black art."

Even her explicitly black-themed piece in Washington, commissioned to work in the history-museum context of the Portrait Gallery and made in response to a poem written by a black icon and all about black culture, is a kind of extract from an ongoing project that casts its net more widely. In what's on its way to becoming what she calls a "big requiem" for our times, Smith has been amassing mementos of all the famous figures who have died during her life. ("I romanticize things," she says, "I don't know if you noticed.") Those dead figures include Tupac (he arrived at the Baltimore School of the Arts just after Smith got the boot, but she knew him through mutual friends) and the other hip-hop artists in "No Thief to Blame," but also Lady Di (a set of commemorative dishes from the Franklin Mint) and Kurt Cobain (a lunch box). Smith is not sure how the project will pan out, but that's the way she works: accumulating stuff that seems to strike a spark, and then recycling it into her art.

Her recent work has often consisted of baled scrap fabric that comments, at least obliquely, on excess consumption and the global trade in castoffs from the West. One such textile bundle is in "Unmonumental," the prestigious show that launched the reopened New Museum in New York. It fits in fine with other global art on display there, and only hints at a background with a can of spray paint on the streets of Baltimore.

Consumption and discarding are as much the subjects of Smith's work as the specifics of what gets consumed and dumped -- throwing out a Tupac T-shirt isn't that different from discarding one commemorating Motley Crue.

Her art has come to be about how busy we all are with feathering our nests as thickly as we can. "I think a lot about the urban habitat as nature," she says. If her cloth bundles often look like something from a homeless person's perch in a bus shelter, that's not because she has borrowed them direct from there. (That would be "vulgar and disgusting," she says.) It's because we're all hopeless accumulators, and the homeless simply take that instinct to what Smith terms its "Sisyphean" extreme.

Her origins may be on Baltimore's lean streets, but she cites New York as the perfect place for her to work: "This is a place of overt overuse and disposal."