Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, Illustration, Risograph, Animation, Murals
Website: crittysmitty.com
Corinne Smith, who also works under the name Critty Smitty, is an Oakland-based artist born in 1989 in Ypsilanti, Michigan. They hold a BFA from the University of Michigan and previously ran a shop and creative space in downtown Oakland. Their practice spans painting, illustration, papercut, risograph, animation, zines, and large-scale murals.
In 2024 Smith was one of the recipients of the Museum of the African Diaspora’s Emerging Artists Program, which presented their solo exhibition Silene Capensis (curated by Key Jo Lee) in MoAD’s Salon from May 29 to July 21, 2024. Earlier, their solo show Revori was presented at SALON, a Public Works gallery in San Francisco, in June 2021, accompanied by an artist talk and film screening. They have also shown in group exhibitions including Local Content at E14 Gallery in Oakland, Friends of Irrelevant Press at Aggregate Gallery in Oakland, and Queer Expo at Clay Clubhouse in Oakland.
Smith’s murals appear throughout the Bay Area, including Convergence (2021) for Shack15 at the San Francisco Ferry Building and Misunderstanding (2021), a Tenderloin mural made with 826 Valencia and the Paint the Void project, as well as commissions for the Tenderloin Community Benefit District, Oakland Unified School District, and others. Their art books and zines, including Feelings and Blackity Black, are published by Irrelevant Press.
Smith’s work is rooted in dreamwork and spiritual herbalism. Having experienced night terrors and sleep paralysis since childhood, they use dream re-entry, guided meditation, and Silene capensis, the African dream root, to revisit dreams and connect with ancestral lineage, treating the process as a form of healing. Color itself is central to the practice: boldly colored illustrations, paintings, and animations offer a view into the etheric process of discovering self and ancestors through non-colonial ways of knowing.
The imagery draws on animal guides, religious iconography, lush botanicals, and self-portraiture. Revori, whose title joins the French rêverie with the Yoruba orí (intuition or destiny), included works such as Seeing and Isis and Nepthis in the Astral Garden. Community access and participation are an important part of the practice, carried through in public murals and small-run zines.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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