Join us on Friday, July 29th as we welcome artist Shinique Smith for an artist talk and conversation about her exhibition STARGAZERS, currently on view at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art.

Shinique will be in conversation with Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, JoAnne Northrup. Learn more about NMOCA and STARGAZERS by following this link.

Shinique Smith’s multidisciplinary practice includes painting, sculpture, video, photography, installation, and performance. Exploring ideas of transformation and ritual through materials such as fabric, clothing, and personal belongings, breath, bundling, collage and gesture, Smith has built a complex visual vocabulary that resonates on intimate and social scales. Her totemic works bear the presence of her body and serve as containers that operate at the convergence of consumption, displacement, and spiritual sanctuary.

Born in Baltimore, currently residing in Los Angeles, Smith’s work has been featured in exhibitions and collections of many prestigious institutions including Baltimore Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, LACMA, Denver Art Museum, Minneapolis Art Institute, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Whitney Museum and Studio Museum in Harlem.

Smith is a 2022 recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize. She has also received awards from Joan Mitchell Foundation, Tiffany Foundation, and Anonymous Was a Woman. Smith earned an MAT from the Museum School and MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, where she was awarded the Alumni Medal of Honor in 2012.

JoAnne Northrup was appointed Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in 2021. Her 2022 exhibitions include Extensions: New Work by Hong Chun Zhang and Shinique Smith: STARGAZERS. Before relocating to Kansas City, she was based on the West Coast. As Curatorial Director and Curator of Contemporary Art of the Nevada Museum of Art (2012-21), she founded the contemporary art program and curated cutting edge exhibitions, including the nationally touring Unsettled (2017-19), organized in collaboration with Ed Ruscha.

Prior to her time in Nevada, Northrup was Fulbright Senior Research Scholar at the ZKM Center for Art + Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. As Chief Curator (2008-2011) and Senior Curator (2001-2008) at the San Jose Museum of Art, in California, she curated and authored the first nationally touring survey exhibitions and monographs on contemporary media artists Jennifer Steinkamp (2006) and Leo Villareal (2010). Two of Northrup’s exhibitions came to Kansas City–the Steinkamp exhibition toured to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in 2007, and the Villareal exhibition toured to the Nerman in 2011.