Hollywood is a city of reinvention, and it’s not just actors who change their names and origin stories. Artist Alexis Smith, née Patricia Anne Smith of Norwalk, California, assumed the spangly pseudonym of the 1940s movie star when she was 17.
It was an innocent, even humorous, choice but one that foregrounded the direction of both her life and her art. “I think when you change your name…it’s a big statement to yourself that you want to be somebody else,” Smith once told me. “Ultimately, I think that’s what mine was.”
Certainly, the act of changing her name freed Smith to invent visual stories, mining fresh meaning from old movies, books, and oddments of pop culture. Throughout her 50-year career of making collages, she has borrowed broadly from swap meet–sourced tableaux, texts, and theatrical installations. “My artwork is about the real world rather than the world of art,” she previously said to me. “It’s about tracing familiar underlying memories, stories and myths that make up our culture.”
In many ways, Smith relies on the slippery nature of memory, a theme so widespread in literature, to seduce her audience. She has often used the writings of Thomas Mann, Jack Kerouac, and Raymond Chandler, but in a context of her own making. And now, over the past decade, her brain has been ravaged by Alzheimer’s. Living in a Craftsman-style cottage in Venice, with her husband of 34 years, artist Scott Grieger, she can no longer form sentences when speaking.
Against this backdrop, the arrival at the recently reopened La Jolla site of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego is fortuitous, if not poignant. Smith’s conceptually oriented art has been shown widely, but not since her 1991 retrospective at the Whitney has there been an opportunity to see a complete overview of her work. MCASD owns 11 pieces by the artist, some of which are among the 50 brought together for the occasion. There are also two large public works in the Stuart Collection on the nearby UC San Diego campus. The show went up on September 15—three weeks after Smith’s 73rd birthday—and runs through February 5, 2023.
