Alexandria Smith

Pronouns: she/her

September 14 – December 4, 2026

Alexandria Smith is a New York City-based artist and educator whose mixed-media works investigate the selfhood of the queer Black femme body. Smith has developed a personal cosmology that she brings to life in boldly colored works that straddle the border between painting and sculpture. Her assemblage paintings incorporate layered shapes made from painted wood and 3D-printed elements that rise from their surfaces and extend beyond their frames.

Smith earned an MFA from Parsons The New School for Design, an MA in art education from New York University, and a BFA in illustration from Syracuse University. Smith has shown her work internationally, including at Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY; 2024), Gagosian (Hong Kong; 2023), and Currier Museum of Art (Manchester, NH; 2023). Smith has been awarded the Queens Museum/Jerome Foundation Fellowship, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art Residency, among others. She is currently the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Studio Art and Assistant Professor of Painting and Printmaking at Yale University School of Art.

During her residency, Smith will translate her assemblage paintings into ceramic reliefs and sculpt the recurring figures from her personal cosmology in three dimensions. She will explore concepts of light—both metaphoric and literal—in this new body of work.