c.1904-1995 · Hazlehurst, Mississippi, USA
Hard of hearing all her life and done with waiting to be heard, she lined her Mississippi yard with painted tin: bold figures, bolder colours, and praise to God in letters the traffic could read.
The life
Smith was born into a sharecropping family in Copiah County, Mississippi, her schooling cut short and her hearing impaired from childhood. She farmed and kept house for decades, and in her seventies began transforming her roadside yard in Hazlehurst into a gallery of corrugated tin and plywood panels. Drivers slowed, word spread, and by the late 1980s her work was travelling to exhibitions across America and into Souls Grown Deep’s great collection of Southern Black art.
The work
Figures with raised arms, self-portraits, Christ and neighbours, slashed onto tin in house paint with a few unhesitating strokes, often with short texts: Here I am. The Lord know my heart. The economy is total, the impact immediate, the yard was the museum.
Why we love them
She built her own audience out of a road. When speech is hard, paint louder.
Go deeper
- Souls Grown Deep Foundation
- Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
- The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.
Kindred spirits
Purvis Young1943-2010, Miami, USA
Bessie Harvey1929-1994, Alcoa, Tennessee, USA
← All 46 artists in the field guide
Untrained and unstoppable, like them? Like us?