On Friday December 4th the Laredo Center for the Arts presents artist Ray Smith for the 20th Art Acquisition Project exhibit.
“With studios in Cuernavaca, Mexico, New York City, Raymondville, and on a family ranch near Brownsville, Ray Smith will transform the main gallery and mezzanine with his magical work in an exhibition titled Before the Future. His daughter, Mariana Smith, will curate the show, which includes drawings, large scale paintings, and sculptural work,” said Center for the Arts board president Pedro Morales.
“The Laredo community is cordially invited to this once in a lifetime opportunity to experience the work of this accomplished master artist,” he added
Before the Future opens on the first Friday Caminarte evening with a reception set for 6 p.m.
Born in Brownsville and raised in Central Mexico, Smith emerged in the arts in the 1980s. His inimitable style and subject matter reflect his bi-cultural American and Mexican heritage in a distinctive visual language that brings together the imaginative possibilities of surrealism, the ambiguity of magical thinking, and the expressive traditions of Mexican muralism.
His cross-cultural background informs his work as an ongoing dialogue that resists the fixed categories of identity and belonging. The varied contorted figures and anthropomorphic animals that inhabit Smith’s work destabilize distinctions between human and animal, reality and imagination, tragedy and absurdity. These visual transformations probe the instability of social structures, cultural conventions, and human behavior.
His body of work is at once deeply personal and broadly resonant, resisting singular interpretations that instead reveal identity, history, and the human condition as perpetually shifting, contradictory, and interconnected.
Smith has held more than 150 exhibitions around the world over the last two decades, mainly in the United States and Mexico, but also in Japan, Europe, and South America.
He participated in the 1989 edition of the Whitney Biennial in New York City. Smith exhibited at the First Triennial of Drawings at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona, Spain, and took part in the group exhibition called Latin American Artists of the 20th Century, which traveled from Seville, Spain, to the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Kunsthalle in Cologne, Germany, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Smith’s paintings are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Wurth Museum in Kunzelman, Germany, the Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, the Museo Contemporáneo de Monterrey, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, among others.
“Ray Smith’s stunning, large-scale paintings of ballerinas and boxers, along with his captivating clock paintings, are truly extraordinary. The Laredo Center for the Arts Art Acquisition Project is proud to present this beautiful exhibition, offering the aspiring artists of our community the opportunityto experience up close and personal the work of one of contemporary art’s most remarkable artists,” said Center for the Arts board vice-president Melissa M. Amici.
(Photos by Michael Mundy)
