South African born American visual artist
Jo Smail (born 1943) is an American artist born and educated in Durban, South Africa.[1] Smail emigrated to the United States in 1985.[2][3]
Early life and education
Smail was born and raised in Durban, South Africa. There she received a degree in English and in history. After having three children, she attended art school.[3]
Career
Her work in painting, collage and drawing has been described as "poetic annotations."[2] Her series of works, “Mongrel Collection,” from 2018 incorporate fragments of printed fabric, drawing and pigment prints mounted on eccentrically shaped MDF board.[4]
Her retrospective exhibition, Flying with Remnant Wings, was presented at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2021.[5][6] She has collaborated on numerous works with the artist William Kentridge during the early years of the 2000s.[3]
She has received reviews in the New York Times,[7] Baltimore Magazine,[5] Art In America,[8] Hyperallergic,[2] Artforum,[4] among other publications.
In 1996, a significant amount of her work was destroyed in a fire at her studio in the Clipper Mill Industrial Park in Baltimore.[2][6] She lost 25 years worth of work in the fire that engulfed her studio. After the fire, her work developed an autobiographical tendency.[9]
Smail taught at the Johannesburg College of Art, the University of the Witwatersrand and at the Maryland Institute College of Art.[9]
Collections
Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art,[10] the Johannesburg Art Museum,[11] the National Gallery of South Africa[11] among other venues. In 1996 she received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship.[11]
Personal life
Smail is married to Julien Davis, a research scientist and photographer.[2] In 2000, she suffered a stroke and lost the ability to walk and speak. She continued to make art beginning with drawings and paintings that depicted "silence and sounds that became a new kind of language." She later regained her mobility and the ability to speak.[3]
References