Celebrating Women's History Month with the Artworks of Colleen Smith!

From left to right: A Certain Kind of Longing, A Beautiful Weight, Morning Glory. These works are on loan to the Unions by C. Pazia Mannella, Catherine Armbrust, and Shawna Johnson respectively.

In honor of Women's History Month, we welcome the artworks of Colleen Smith to the MU Student Center. Colleen Smith is an artist who grew up in New Jersey. She graduated with a B.A. in Fine Arts and English from Saint Joseph’s University in 2011. She entered the MFA program at Mizzou in 2014 where she was a Paul D. Coverdell Peace Corps Fellow. She is currently at Montclair State University where she is a MFA candidate. Smith has exhibited artworks in Missouri at the Central Bank of Boone County, the Boone County Art Show, and the Craft Studio. She has also exhibited in Ukraine where she was a member of the Peace Corps. She is the recipient of many awards, including first place in the Columbia Art League show, “Pathways and Passages,” and the Dorothy Rollins Memorial Scholarship for Drawing and Painting.

The Passing, courteously on loan from Matt Ballou. This painting is on display in the Lower Lair outside of the Multicultural Center.

Smith’s work focuses largely on representational figures that are cast into fantastical environments. She is interested in the body for its power to communicate human emotions; she suggests the body’s vulnerabilities with obscuring veils and uses color to call attention to the tensions between external and internal emotional worlds. In these works on display, Smith exploits the expectations imposed on females by painting women who are aesthetically beautiful, but are haunted by some darker force. In exploring what it means to be a woman, Smith purposefully leaves her conclusions ambiguous, leaving the viewer to decide what makes up the feminine identity.

Come visit Colleen Smith's artworks in person on the first floor and in the Lower Lair of the MU Student Center through the end of March!

Come visit these works in person on the first floor of the MU Student Center, right near US Bank.

Blogpost authored by Lauren DiSalvo, Curator of Public Arts at the MU Student Unions