Her body of work: Shinique Smith shines in solo show at MOCA:
“Shinique Smith is surveying her first solo museum show and, of course, sweating the details. Born in Baltimore in 1971, she began her career as a stylist/wardrobe assistant for films and opera — her mother was a designer and an editor for Baltimore Style magazine — then switched tracks to that whole Brooklyn artist/hipster number. The catalog for Shinique Smith: Menagerie at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami contains an essay by the forever groovy DJ Spooky, aka Paul D. Miller, who writes about Smiths knack for synthesizing mediums, her stature in the post-Facebook/YouTube generation and the “libidinal economy of “scripting autobiographical statements into her work. Millers a darn good DJ, too.”