Shinique Smith: Menagerie

MOCA’s Knight Exhibition Series will feature Shinique Smith’s first large-scale U.S. museum exhibition. Smith will use MOCA’s flexible gallery space to explore new ways of working and installing her work, weaving a line both physically and figuratively throughout the space. Since bursting onto the scene in 2000, this New York-based artist has produced works that combine complex social and cultural references with a broad array of art historical sources, including African American art, color field painting, minimal sculpture and Japanese calligraphy. Her sculpture and installations are composed of collections and accumulations of found objects and second-hand clothing, which she ties together to form minimal cubes or wraps into bulbous bundles. Urban life is suggested both in her sculptures of castoffs as well as the graffiti-like gestures of her exuberant paintings.

Shinique Smith: Menagerie is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami in association with Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, WI, and is curated by MOCA, North Miami Executive Director and Chief Curator Bonnie Clearwater. Shinique Smith: Menagerie is made possible by the MOCA Knight Exhibition Endowment and Funding Arts Network. The exhibition will be on view at Madison Museum of Contemporary Art from January 22 – May 8, 2011. An illustrated catalog co-published by the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami and Madison Museum of Contemporary Art will accompany the exhibition featuring essays by Bonnie Clearwater, Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Jane Simon, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art Curator of Exhibitions and Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky.)

Shinique Smith: Menagerie
Kurator: Bonnie Clearwater