Mystical painter highlights MOCA North Miami's spring season

Miami Herald

2 days ago

There's plenty going on in the mind of Philip Smith, and it shows in his art. The Miami-born painter's canvases are full of esoteric symbols and mystical imagery gleaned from years of studying ancient cultures, world religions, and the work of historical magicians. Spirals, DNA strands, minerals, magic circles, foliage, human hands – all coexist in a ghostly mélange of images and ideograms.
'These images are meant to basically provoke your imagination,' says Smith, who is currently the subject of a career-spanning retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, which opened Wednesday, April 30 and is on view through Sunday, Oct. 5.
'The idea of looking at my paintings is a bit akin to sitting in a planetarium, where you're looking up at the stars and they project all these patterns. And you're told to see those patterns, that this is the Milky Way, but then your mind wanders and you start to see other things. And that's the idea with my work, really. It's a portal for the imagination.'
Smith's encounters with the supernatural began during his childhood in Miami. His father Lew Smith, who had been an interior decorator for famous and powerful people such as Walt Disney and Cuban president Carlos Prio Socarras, one day discovered he could speak to the dead and heal the sick. He became a faith healer, and the difficulties this placed on then-teenage Philip, who eventually wrote about the experience in his memoir 'Walking Through Walls,' put him on his own spiritual quest. He tried drugs. He joined, and later left, the Church of Scientology. And finally, he moved to New York to become an artist, and from there he developed the image-dense visual language in his paintings.
'As a kid, I wanted to be an archeologist, so I was looking at, obviously, Sumerian and Egyptian and Indian temples,' he says. 'I wanted to sort of create a pictographic language, also a slightly cinematic language. Because I think we respond to that experientially and also cerebrally more than words,' he says.
Smith explains that words have to be learned, whereas images are immediate.
'When you speak to mediums or psychics, they get their information visually. It's imprinted. They see things as they're talking to you. And so all those components go into making up this visual language,' he says.
Smith's work managed to get noticed by the critic Douglas Crimp, who put him in a soon-to-be-influential show at Artists Space in downtown Manhattan called 'Pictures.' It included several artists, including Robert Longo and Sherrie Levine, who would later be part of the so-called 'the Pictures Generation,' a group of artists who were deeply influenced by the culture of mass media that was present at the time. Smith describes the art scene of that time as vastly different from today's more professionalized art ecosystem, full of passionate people that did what they did not for money, but because they felt a calling.
'I didn't understand what kids learn with their MFA today, how to network, how to write emails, how to get curators into your studio. I thought my job was just to make art, and the art world was very small and very personal. You kind of met everybody.'
He says he was friendly with the likes of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns.
'(Warhol) would call me every Saturday at the studio and chat. I interviewed Jasper Johns for Interview (magazine), and I would walk over to Bob Rauschenberg's house at four o'clock in the morning and sit there and drink with him. It was a very different world. And it was more a world where you kind of made it up as you went along. None of us knew what we were doing, but we all knew we were doing something different.'
Still, he always wanted to come back to Miami, the place he considers his true home. After nearly three decades in New York, in 2019, he returned to South Florida and has staged several shows since then, mostly with the Little River-based gallery PRIMARY. The MoCA show, his first solo museum exhibition in Miami for several decades and one that incorporates work from 'Pictures' to now, is something of a culmination for him.
'I've always wanted to do a major show in Miami, because it's the city that I really love,' he says. 'I had to leave Miami as a young artist, because there was no opportunity. There were no real museums, no galleries, no collectors. There was nothing here. So that's why I went to New York.'
Smith mentions the progression of Miami's art museums.
'Whether it's the Rubell Museum, or Marty Margulies, or Art Basel – it's an extraordinary transformation that I don't know, that people appreciate, how it went from the desert to Tribeca in a generation or two.'
For the artist, the retrospective at MoCA is important on many levels.
'It's a very meaningful show to me, because I feel it's giving back to Miami as a Miami person, and I'm not coming in as a New Yorker saying 'see how great I am.' I'm coming in and saying, 'I want to share with you what my life's been about.''
Smith's status as a Miami-born artist who spent much of his career in New York complements that of MoCA's other spring show, a New York-born artist who spent much of her life in South Florida. Vickie Pierre worked for Miami art institutions, including at the former Miami Art Museum (now PAMM) and as registrar at MoCA NoMi. But alongside that career, she also made art herself, and now her work is on view in the show 'The Maiden is the Warrior.'
The exhibition zeros in on the artist's 'Poupées in the Bush' series, featuring amorphous black blobs with clearly defined feminine features, somewhere between figures and abstract forms. Some have fingers, horns, and other protrusions appended to their bodies. Others wear rings or are surrounded by floral assemblages. Reflecting the duality of womanhood as in the title of the show, the Poupées are meant to have a bit of softness as well as ferocity, according to curator Adeze Wilford.
'The thrust of our show is really about the duality of their forms. Like they can equally be these, very soft, reclining figures, kind of droopy and globular but also very, almost Rubenesque in how they're conceived of. But then there are some that have these very fierce bearings,' says Wilford.
Though the two shows are quite distinct, Wilford, who is curating her final show for MoCA after moving to the Memphis Art Museum in January, hopes viewers will be able to envelop themselves in each.
'The way that I conceive of solo presentations is really that the artists are inviting you into their world, into how their brain is working, and so they're very different people, and we can see how things are unfolding for them both.'
WHAT: 'Philip Smith: Magnetic Fields' and 'Vickie Pierre: The Maiden is the Warrior'
WHERE: Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, 770 NE 125th St., North Miami
WHEN: Noon to 7 p.m. Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday through Sunday. Through Sunday, Oct. 5.
COST: $10 for general admission; $5 for seniors, students with ID, ages 12 to 17, and disabled visitors; free for museum members, children under 12 years old, North Miami residents and city employees, veterans, and caregivers of disabled visitors.
INFORMATION: 305-893-6211 and mocanomi.org
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