Alexis Smith, an artist who expressed a searing but affectionate vision of American culture in assemblages, installations and public art projects, died Tuesday at her home in Venice, California. She was 74 years old.
The Garth Greenan Gallery in New York, which represents his estate, confirmed his death. Ms. Smith was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2015.
In his art, Smith criticizes the American dream, but in a bittersweet way, with sympathy for those who pursue it.
The installation “Isadora,” from 1980, demonstrates the tender way in which Smith could convey the tenuous immortality of fame. The play tells the story of modern dancer Isadora Duncan’s tragic final days in Nice, southern France. Two groups of framed pages, one in the shape of a Greek temple and the other like the car in which Duncan died in 1927 when her long scarf became tangled around a rotating hubcap, combine lines of text with solitary objects. The introduction of the installation is a dried seahorse and the conclusion, a ring of red hair. The collages hang from a stunning mountainous coastline painted on corrugated paper strips that decorate the classrooms. Some white starfish add to a starry sky.
“I’ve made things out of everything,” Smith said in an oral history for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. “I mean, everything you can imagine.”
Smith searched thrift stores and auctions for his materials. He devoured pulp novels, vulgar movies and tasteless magazines. His work revolves around elegant juxtapositions between found images and literary quotations.
A series she called “Chandlerisms,” for example, is composed of letter-sized collages that caption inconspicuous objects like small plastic cups or a fortune cookie with brutally succinct typed excerpts from Raymond Chandler’s detective novels. “I feel terrible. I felt like an amputated leg,” she reads in “Chandlerism #30.” There is only one other element in the frame: a worn-out matchbox.
Although rooted in Southern California, Smith was a broadly American artist, captivated by people remaking themselves, in Hollywood or elsewhere in the “Out West,” to the point that, at age 17, He took the name of a movie star: Alexis Smith.
“Her subject matter was really the culture of the United States, the culture that was found in movies, books and advertising,” said the painter Vija Celmins, a close friend and former teacher of Ms. Smith. “Kind of ‘I’ll be a winner.’”
Patricia Anne Smith was born in Los Angeles on August 24, 1949. Her father, Dayrel Driver Smith, was a military surgeon and later a psychiatrist at the Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk, California. The family lived on the hospital grounds until her mother, Lucille Lloyd Doak, a homemaker, died in 1961.
Ms. Smith studied at the University of California, Irvine from 1967 to 1970. In her oral history, she called her choice of school “the most auspicious decision I have ever made in my entire life.” There she met older artists such as Celmins and the minimalist Robert Irwin, as well as the performance artist Chris Burden.
He was among the first wave of conceptual artists to settle in Southern California, rather than New York.
His circle included conceptual artist John Baldessari and architect Frank Gehry, art critic Dave Hickey, and poet Amy Gerstler. The video and performance artist Paul McCarthy said in an interview that he considers Ms. Smith’s first artist’s books unique: folios in a format
similar to “Isadora”, equivalent to a groundbreaking work of art self-published by Barbara T. Smith and Nancy Buchanan, and remembers Alexis Smith as a fundamental character for the Los Angeles scene in the last 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 two decades at universities in the Los Angeles area and beyond, including several years at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was part of the group of artists who founded the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1979.
Gradually, Smith developed a distinctive way of combining framed collages and dramatic hand-painted murals, in which, as McCarthy said, “the room becomes like the extension of the sheet of paper.”
A landmark installation, “Same Old Paradise,” was commissioned by the Brooklyn Museum in 1987 and is now on display in the Stuart Collection at the University of California, San Diego. It’s a wide-angle Hollywood backdrop-style mural featuring mountains, orange trees, and a menacing snake marked like a two-lane highway. A row of blown-up commercial photographs framed in weathered wood have lines from Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and punning objects like toy arrows jutting into space. The atmosphere evokes John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” and Roman Polanski’s 1974 film “Chinatown.”
Ms. Smith had a mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1991. Over the next decade, she completed a series of important public commissions. She designed dazzling terrazzo floors at the Los Angeles Convention Center (one showing the night sky, the other a globe projection centered on the Pacific Rim) and at an Ohio State University stadium.
At the University of California, San Diego, “Snake Path,” a serpentine, slate-scaled path, winds 560 feet past a miniature Garden of Eden and ends at the university library—another parable of personal transformation sweetened by forbidden knowledge.
Although Ms. Smith had said that she did not consider her work to have a feminist theme, she cast astute glances at popular representations of women throughout her career. In 2007, her work was included in the historic “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” which opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art and traveled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington and the PS1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1) in Queens.
Her next major retrospective, “The American Way,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 2022, introduced Ms. Smith to a new audience. “I was surprised by the seriousness with which she treated humor and the everyday,” Anthony Graham, who curated the exhibition when she was 30, said in an interview. “She took things that were overlooked and common and she brought out the things that made them special.”
The San Diego show recovered from years of storage Smith’s 2001 “Red Carpet” installation, which mocks the theatrical gloss of Hollywood but retains its grandeur. The work features a monumental serape rug that leads to a mural of a sunset, with a text in capital letters on the wall: “Heaven for the climate. Hell for the company.
Ms. Smith also did complementary work: a panoramic screen print of a serape pattern in the colors of a black table and a fiery sky. The phrase above could have been Smith’s motto: “Nothing is new except what has been forgotten.”
