Hey New York, SHRINE has an amazing show of works up right now by Mary T Smith! Trust me, I’ve seen the works. Or if you don’t, read this:

“Mary, who was hearing-impaired from an early age, was the third of 13 children; she and her siblings helped their sharecropper father grow, pick, and pack vegetables. Given her hearing disability, she had a hard time in school but still managed to reach the fifth grade; as a child, she often spent time alone, drawing.

Smith later worked as a domestic servant for white families and was married twice, but it was with her third partner that she had her only child. Although Mary and that son’s father never married, he built her a house in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, in which she brought up their child — and it was there that she discovered a sense of personal freedom, creating a home and transforming the yard around it into an open-air space for making and presenting her art….

Read the rest.