Anna Kustera Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of work spanning the past six years by influential artist Mimi Smith. Smith, an early maker of feminist art, has addressed clothing as sculpture throughout her career. Here the artist continues her explorations of sociopolitical imperatives-explicit or perceived-through a personalized history that constitutes not only her own life’s totem, but a timeline of femininity itself.

Far from being intimidated by stereotypical gender roles, Smith subverts female traditions such as knitting, pregnancy and frilly fashion with her intricate, handmade artifacts. Since the 1960s, the artist has employed unconventional materials such as steel wool, knotted thread, and yarn to create her memorable repertoire. For this, her fourth exhibition at the gallery, the artist presents sculptures and drawings that reference women in the military, 9/11, and the fur industry. Perhaps most significantly, the works on display are concerned with the somewhat cruel process of aging, which of course, can feel very much like disappearing.

Smith’s Endangered Species Coat (2007) is constructed of a symmetrical assemblage of plush stuffed toys and might act as ironic protection from our harsh environment. The yarn babies in the gallery recall her 1968 Knit Baby, a piece which arose from the aftermath of the artist’s miscarriage and came complete with instructions for knitting and stuffing one’s own child. Smith’s more recent dolls exist in a contemporary world inundated with fertility drugs and terrorism. Camouflage Maternity Dress (2004) is a direct re-imagining of the artist’s breakthrough piece entitled Maternity Dress (1966). Sporting an identical plastic dome as its progenitor, the camouflage version draws further attention to the maternal bump that many expectant women go to great lengths to conceal. Smith’s see-through baby-viewer evokes incubator and bomb shelter in equal measure. Clothing and Motherhood, within the scope of Smith’s investigations, are signifiers of womankind’s collective fears, travails, transgressions and triumphs.

Mimi Smith will be the subject of a survey exhibition at The Newark Museum in 2013. Her work was included in the seminal exhibition, ‘WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution’, and has been shown at the ICA in Philadelphia, the RISD Museum in Rhode Island, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, PS 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, the Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada and London’s Hayward Gallery.