Earlier this year, I met artist Karinne Smith at a coffee shop in Dallas. We were both invited by a mutual friend and I learned a bit about her art practice. I was surprised that the Yale graduate from Southern California was in DFW and not just for a short trip. Smith was invited to come to Fort Worth, for over a year to participate in a residency in the city’s downtown area known as Sundance Square. Though I’m typically up-to-date on the local art scene, this was something I hadn’t heard about. Smith and I scheduled a studio visit so I could see her residency space and her works in progress.
Below is an edited version of our conversation.
Jessica Fuentes (JF): How did this residency opportunity come about?
Karinne Smith (KS): I graduated in 2020 and we didn’t have a physical graduation [because of the COVID-19 pandemic]. So, getting out into a world that was all shut down was strange. In a way, I’m grateful because since everything was stopped, there was no comparing yourself to others, we were all in the same space. I think that was a blessing.
During that time, I was teaching and a friend of mine, Jeffrey Maris, who had a show at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, reached out to me and suggested that I do a post-studio visit with a friend of his. I had no idea who it was, but I was at my wit’s end, just ready to move on from New Haven. That’s how I met Sasha Bass. She came through to Erector Square, the studios that a lot of Yale graduates relocate to after graduation. She visited my studio and we hit it off. Afterward, I think I messaged her to say thank you and she invited me out to Fort Worth. I came out the same weekend as the Art Fair and she showed me spaces that were empty but not finished out. I proposed that this could be my space and we kept the conversation going.
I did research on year-long residencies and proposed a structure for how this could look, detailing public interactions, stipend, the culminating project, and other things like that.
JF: That’s pretty amazing, kind of like a build-your-own-residency. When did you arrive in Fort Worth?
KS: I got to Fort Worth on September 1, 2023. I was stewing for a while and then I got access to my studio. This space was finished in January, so I moved in right away. Since I didn’t have a studio for those first few months, Mrs. Bass agreed to extend the residency to a full year from when I got access to the studio space. I am aiming to have my show next January.
JF: Before you got access to the studio, what did you do from September to January?
KS: It was this weird thing, where I felt like I should be doing something but I didn’t know what that was. So, I started to research, kind of throwing myself back into this work mode that I hadn’t done since graduate school. After graduating and before this, I was working in my studio on the weekends because I had a full-time job and was teaching. But this is the first time in a long time when it’s just been like, “Let’s try and figure out what the studio practice looks like.”
I was reading a lot. I went into an internet hole and found books that I started to gather to read. I was looking at theories of cuteness and reading poetry, like Anne Sexton’s poems. I went to a lot of museums. The Bouchet pieces at the Kimbell were a rabbit hole I went down. I was drawing, but drawing had never really been a part of my practice. I was just dying to get my hands on material, because that, for me, is when the work begins. I don’t really work with a plan in mind, I’m just kind of like, “What does this do? Let’s see what this does. How does this look?” I play with things and the work is frustrating in ways, but it takes form through that experimentation and failure. A lot of failure, sure, or just happy mistakes, of me hanging something a certain way and it works.
JF: What kinds of materials are you working with?
KS: This has been my chance to really experiment with the collagen material. I haven’t had the opportunity to experiment with it before because it’s expensive and takes a lot of time. So this was my moment to figure out how I can stretch this material.
Karinne Smith’s studio
JF: Where do you see this work going?
KS: Beyond knowing I wanted it to be collagen based, I also wanted the work to reflect the space I’m in. I’m hoping it becomes a cohesive body of work that has a shared visual language that reflects the overbearing presence of the sun. In these spaces, the sun literally bleaches color. So that’s where I’m getting a lot of the color palette. Also, I’m picking up on stars everywhere, that’s not common in other states. So, I keep pulling visual cues from being in Fort Worth, walking around, and seeing things.
I wouldn’t say that the work directly references an architectural site, but I am connecting a lot with my background. I grew up in Southern California, but in the desert, so it’s a similar landscape. I ran away from it immediately, but I find myself back here and I’m trying to make sense of that. This is the Sunbelt, New Mexico has places that look like this too… you know, the tan strip malls that have sun bleached signs… I think a lot about what I’m connecting to with that. It’s this kind of middle class, or lower middle class even, desert aesthetic.
Karinne Smith’s studio
JF: You’re from California, and you were at Yale when you were approached by Mrs. Bass about coming to Fort Worth… What preconceived ideas did you have about Texas before you arrived? What were your thoughts about the state as a whole, or even Fort Worth specifically?
KS: Much to many people’s disappointment, I immediately just thought of Austin. I’ve seen Austin and assumed it would be a copy paste situation. I’ve had friends that have visited Texas before, so I knew a little of what to expect. I was shocked at how white it is in Fort Worth. I’ve used Facebook Marketplace to source materials, so that takes me into many different neighborhoods and parts of the DFW metroplex. When I’m waiting on messages from Facebook Marketplace or just killing time, I spend time in Mexican grocery stores and it takes me back to East LA. I was more expecting that and not this, which is more white suburbia. What I didn’t expect was White Settlement Road, and these very strange things that I’m surprised still exist.
JF: Fort Worth, like most cities in the U.S., is a historically segregated city. It does have Latino neighborhoods and historically Black neighborhoods, and then there is West and Southwest Fort Worth that tend to be more white.
KS: Yeah, everywhere is like that. In New Haven, The Hill is the Black neighborhood and then Fair Haven, which is where I was living, was heavily Puerto Rican and Dominican. The other thing that beat my expectations is that I wasn’t expecting it to be as green as it is. I was shocked at how green it is. I know in the summer it gets yellow and dried out, but that shocked me.
I spent a bit of COVID with my mother, who lives in Palm Desert, where it gets to 123 degrees. I was preparing myself mentally to be in that again. I prefer the East Coast’s colder climate. So, I’m reckoning what I ran away from in my adult life.
JF: That’s really an important part of adulting. Coming back around to what you left, checking in with yourself. Life is very cyclical.
KS: There’s a lot of loops happening in my life right now. I’m wondering where to go next. That’s on my mind because a year goes by fast. I’m definitely checking in with myself and considering where I’m at in my life and where I want to be.
Karinne Smith’s studio
JF: Coming back to the art. What are you most excited about that you’re working on right now?
KS: I’m most excited about the chairs. I have this lounger and some lawn chairs… and I’m thinking about the pool chairs that are left outside on the lawn. In conjunction with that, I’m also doing a lot of material experimentation with the texture of the collagen. I’ve found that it really looks like molted snake skin… and I’ve also made gel medium scales. Essentially, I want to make these massive molted snake skins that are coiled on this lounger. Then, on the chairs, I want to have them in a tight circle, bound together with twine, and I want to coil the snakeskin around it. The thought behind it is, I want it to look like something happened and we don’t know if it’s a transformation or consumption or ritual. I want to do doubles, I’m thinking about twins a lot in this series and so I’m making two of everything.
Artworks in Karinne Smith’s studio
JF: What is it about the collagen that is attractive to you?
KS: I used collagen for my senior thesis and since I graduated, I’ve been making these giant rooms with collagen. They are installations that you can walk into and are very neoclassical. They’ve all been pink. These pieces have gotten a good reception but I’m interested in working with the material in other ways. It’s like a textile, but you can also stiffen it to make a sculpture. It’s skin-like as well. This is a good opportunity to move away from what I was doing and get into different ways of pushing the material, while still sharing a visual language with past works.
This new piece is more fantasy than the earlier work. Recently, I was talking with somebody about fantasy in regards to the South. I’m from Southern California, but I have family roots in Alabama and Georgia. In the South, there are stories, like myths. A lot of the spooky, horror, stories that come out of the South come from a real place. And, when you’re in the South, you’re kind of faced with the reality that there is a dark underbelly. I’m interested in playing with that fantasy with these creepy creatures, these things that we only see the evidence of its past — I don’t want to bring trauma into it, but the after effects of that as well.
Karinne Smith’s studio
JF: There is a lot of brightness and lightness to your work, which makes it feel soft in ways and maybe more accessible. When you walk in and see it, it doesn’t feel like a dark subject matter.
KS: I want it to be soft because I’m very aware of how it can look abject. I don’t want that. I’ve seen work like that and it has a place in the canon for sure, but I don’t want to be associated immediately with abject. I walk that line very carefully, because I do want there to be some kind of nasty quality to it, and the material lends itself that way, but I want more of a read than that.
JF: So, all of this work culminates in a solo show in January? Where will it be?
KS: At Caravan, which is the larger of Mrs. Bass’ art spaces downtown. I’m definitely thinking about how big the work is… the objective of the show is not to fill a space. I’m thinking about how much space is a work on the wall versus a sculpture that’s in the round. I’m thinking through those things because in New York, you’re dealing with a lot smaller spaces. Solo shows usually have a maximum of 12 pieces. I want to go big, you know… Texas… but the space is huge.
JF: To wrap up, I’m curious to hear your perspective on why residency experiences are important and necessary for artists.
KS: They are important because without this opportunity, I would be relegated to only working on art on weekends or midnight, after I’m done working. I am fortunate in that after undergrad, when I went to grad school, I already had a career in graphic design. So, I could easily jump back into that, but that’s a full time job, 9-to-5. I was doing that before grad school and I don’t really want to go back to that. Residencies like these give you the chance to just dive completely into your work and create something completely new and bring you to the other side of something that you were just kind of peering into at first. Also, I’m saving a lot of money, so I get to do my work and set myself up for whatever happens after this.
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