Mickey Smith

Mickey Smith (born 1972 in Duluth, Minnesota, U.S.) is an American photographer, conceptual artist, and jewellery designer working in Auckland, New Zealand. Her works have exhibited throughout the United States, in Europe, China, Oceania, and Russia. She has received a McKnight Artist Fellowship for Photography as well as grants from Forecast Public Art, CEC ArtsLink, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

In 2018, Te Tuhi published her book As You Will... Carnegie Libraries of the South Pacific, a documentary project focused on the 25 Carnegie libraries erected in New Zealand, Australia, and Fiji. Her first artist's book, Denudation, published by Hassla, was included in the photobook installation, A Different Kind of Order: The ICP Triennial in 2012. Mickey recently completed a Diploma in Jewellery Design from Hungry Creek Art & Craft School, expanding her artistic practice.

Smith's work is available through Sanderson Contemporary, Auckland and ClampArt, New York.

Series

Volume In her series, Volume (2006-2010), Smith photographed library-stack sets of bound periodicals to memorialize them as shared objects of a common literary culture, now passed. Volume documented bound periodicals and journals in public libraries. The books and words are not touched, artificially lit, or manipulated – rather created by the librarian, found in the stacks, and positioned by the last anonymous reader. The focus was on simple, provocative titles that transcend the spines on which they appear to create conceptual, language-based, anthropological works. Smith's large scale installations, Collocations, were an evolution of the Volume series.

Believe You Me In Believe You Me (2010), she examined the manner in which books and book-learning continue to deliver status even in a culture that has turned away from reading—indeed even more powerfully, and more pervasively, than in eras that had not yet given up on the book as a storehouse of knowledge. In these contemporary images, books have become vacant props, drafted into private battles and culture wars out of a desperate nostalgia for the fading power of the written word.

Denudation In her series, Denudation (2012), Mickey Smith presents a kind of in-situ laboratory-style photography—the image as evidentiary document, the print as cold case. The stark, dark photographs in this new exhibition test the limits of objectivity and the false consolation of casualness even as, in the tradition of documentary and crime-scene photography, the images aspire to conscientious neutrality. The photographs document those objects discarded within an abandoned library, but their formal objectivity is no guard against the ghosts of narrative, perceived or imagined.

Awards Creative New Zealand Grantee, 2016 Public Art Year in Review Project Winner, 2010 LMCC Manhattan Community Arts Fund Grantee, 2009 Permanent Commission Recipient, University of Florida, 2009 CEC Artslink Grantee, 2008 Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers [Nominee], 2008 Fulbright Research Fellowship [Finalist + Alternate], 2008 FORECAST Public Artworks Public Art Affairs Grantee, 2007 Magenta Foundation's Flash Forward [Honorable Mention], 2007 McKnight Foundation Artist Fellowship for Photography, 2006

Collections Center for Photography at Woodstock, Woodstock, NY Dorsey & Whitney, Minneapolis, MN Fidelity Corporate Art Collection, Boston, MA Fredrickson & Byron, Minneapolis, MN Johns Hopkins Children's Center, Baltimore, MD Miami Dade Public Library, Miami, FL Minnesota Historical Society, Saint Paul, MN Museum of Modern Art Library, New York, NY Northland Collection, Saint Paul, MN North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, ND Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE University of Florida, Gainesville, FL Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN