Smith will cover the gallery walls with quotations from novelist and Hollywood screenwriter Raymond Chandler collaged with her own imagery. It will not be the first time she has used the words of authors in combination with her imagery. She has produced work related to Thomas Mann, Gertrude Stein, Walt Whitman, F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos. Smith has been working on her minimal mixed media she refers to as “Chandlerisms” since 1978 and has collected nearly 300 phrases.
Smith of Los Angeles, earned a bachelor's degree at University of California, Irvine, and has held solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); the Brooklyn Museum; Centre Georges Pompidou; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). Her works are in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including MoMA, the Whitney, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the High Museum of Art, MOCA, Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Walker Art Center.
Smith's work extends to large installations, such as The Snake Path that leads to the Geisel Library as part of the Stuart Collection on the UCSD campus.
The Athenaeum holds several Smith materials in its collections, including Richard Armstrong's catalog of her Whitney show Alexis Smith (Rizzoli, 1991), and the artist's books “Alone,” “Past Lives” and “Jane.”