Emily Mae Smith

Emily Mae Smith, the first standalone volume of the artist’s work, provides a panoramic view of Smith’s playful, illusionistic, and deeply intelligent oeuvre. For the past fifteen years, Emily Mae Smith has brought her lush, humorous, and highly stylized sensibility to bear in one visually stunning canvas after another, artfully blending a Surrealist spirit with the flair of Pop Art and her own feminist aesthetic. Emily Mae Smith, the first standalone volume of the artist’s work, provides a panoramic view of Smith’s playful, illusionistic, and deeply intelligent oeuvre. With more than 250 illustrated pages, boasting over 150 full-color reproductions that bring Smith’s crisp and exquisitely detailed paintings to life, the book takes a close look at her career to date.

Emily Mae Smith’s images are supported by text contributions from Suzanne Hudson, Gabriela Rangel, and Jenni Sorkin that contextualize Smith’s work and practice and illuminate her engagement with contemporary subjects like gender, violence, and capitalism – all the while providing analyses of important compositions like her anthropomorphic broom series. Smith’s sly figurations are perhaps best exemplified by this fey avatar, serving at once as a visual referent for the painter’s brush, an emblem of women’s domestic labor, and a playful embodiment of phallic forces. Emily Mae Smith takes readers on a journey through the artist’s ferociously idiosyncratic vision, providing insight into one of the most startling and original bodies of work in contemporary art.