SAN DIEGO, CA.- On September 15, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego opened Alexis Smith: The American Way, the first retrospective of California artist Alexis Smith (b. 1949, Los Angeles, CA) in thirty years. A series of public programs and educational events are planned to coincide with the exhibition, which will run through February 3, 2023 at the recently renovated La Jolla flagship location.

Smith is widely known for her mixed-media collage works which draw heavily on film, literature, pop culture and Hollywood. Her unique practice has been informed by Conceptual and Pop art and shaped by the Feminist movement of the 1970s, yet she has set out a path all her own and her consistently defies easy categorization. The American Way brings together fifty artworks from each stage of the artist's career, from her early artist books and intimate collages to wall paintings and room-sized installations. Featuring work produced throughout the artist's career, from the 1970s to the 2010s, this exhibition highlights the themes that permeate the artist's oeuvre, including her interests in gender, identity, and class.

Smith’s artistic practice can be connected to a sense of self-invention. This is visuall articulated by one of her most iconic works titled Your Name Here (1975), which is a director’s chair with the artist’s name emblazoned on the backrest. Alexis Smith was, however, not the artist’s given name. Born Patti Anne Smith, she adopted the moniker of actress Alexis Smith during her first year of study at the University of California, Irvine as a means of starting afresh. This choice not only represents a clear nod to the resounding presence of Hollywood in the artist’s cultural consciousness—a glimmering world where anyone can arrive to supposedly become someone else—but also reflects her interest in identity and its construction through eliciting confusion between Smith the artist and Smith the actress.




Smith was born in Los Angeles, and has continued to live there throughout her career. It is thus only apt that Hollywood, the very pinnacle of American fantasy-making, should recur as a subject throughout much of her work. In a series titled The Twentieth Century (1983), for example, Smith screenprinted the same phrase onto numerous found movie posters. Each movie ends the same way—the hero falls in love, the starlet dies, the credits roll, and it all begins again. Such stories are as such not only endemic to Hollywood and Smith’s coming of age as an artist, but also remain central to the creation of the American ideal, which Smith so often keenly and even humorously scrutinizes.

Her resulting collages consequently tend to include movie posters, album covers,
advertisements, and news clippings. Through her collage, Smith underscores the way that media prop up quintessentially American stories of selfinvention and reinvention, built upon shared fantasies and futile aspirations. The 1980 collage The American Way, from which this exhibition takes its name, combines text from John Dos Passos’s trilogy of novels, U.S.A., with a variety of objects, news clippings, and advertising images to illuminate ideas about consumption and success that appear throughout Dos Passos’s fragmented text while also conveying that the American way is an idea both elusive and disorienting.

Kathryn Kanjo, David C. Copley Director and CEO, comments: “MCASD is the perfect place for this major and long overdue retrospective of Alexis Smith, who not only has strong ties to Southern California—where she has lived throughout her life—but also with the Museum itself, as one of our collection artists. I’m particularly excited to see the return of Smith’s iconic wall-based collage, Men Seldom Make Passes at Girls Who Wear Glasses (1985), which formerly welcomed visitors in the Museum’s entryway, because it emblematizes just how large of an impact she has had in the San Diego community for so long.”

Anthony Graham, Associate Curator, comments: “Alexis Smith has long been considered a central figure of art in Los Angeles and has continued to have an impactful presence in the region–and yet, her work has not received the critical attention that it deserves. Smith's singular career working in collage expands our understanding of American art and provokes us to think critically on the culture we share.”