Emily Mae Smith

Emily Mae Smith was born in Austin, Texas in 1979. She had an interest in the art world in her formative years, but little exposure to an art community. “I grew up in very rural, very isolated, Southwest Texas.” she said. “I didn’t get on an airplane until I was eighteen. I never saw much artwork outside of a museum in the state of Texas until I was practically an adult. I was like someone who was art-starving, and now I just want to see it all and interact with it all.”

Smith attended the University of Texas at Austin, where she completed a B.F.A. in Studio Art in 2002. Some of her teachers at the university were from New York, and she felt herself gravitating toward them and the idea that she would like to continue her art education in New York. The only school that she applied to was Columbia University. She was accepted by Columbia and earned an M.F.A. in Visual Art in 2006.

In 2005, she was awarded the  Edward Mazella Jr. Scholarship from Columbia University and received the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting in 2018.

Smith’s works are a mixture of social and political commentary, and often an homage to historical painting movements. 

The works of Emily Mae Smith are part of the permanent collection of The Whitney, The Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Contemporary art Los Angeles, the Blanton Museum in Austin, the SCAD Museum in Savannah, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Le Consortium in Dijon, France, the Museum Brandhorst in Munich, the Powerlong Art Museum in Shanghai and other fine venues.

Emily Mae Smith lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.