Jo Smail

Smail was born and raised in Durban, South Africa. There she received a degree in English and in history. After having three children, she attended art school.^[3]

Her work in painting, collage and drawing has been described as "poetic annotations."^[2] Her series of works, “Mongrel Collection,” from 2018 incorporate fragments of printed fabric, drawing and pigment prints mounted on eccentrically shaped MDF board.^[4]

Her retrospective exhibition, Flying with Remnant Wings, was presented at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2021.^[5][6] She has collaborated on numerous works with the artist William Kentridge during the early years of the 2000s.^[3]

She has received reviews in the New York Times,^[7] Baltimore Magazine,^[5] Art In America,^[8] Hyperallergic,^[2] Artforum,^[4] among other publications.

In 1996, a significant amount of her work was destroyed in a fire at her studio in the Clipper Mill Industrial Park in Baltimore.^[2][6] She lost 25 years worth of work in the fire that engulfed her studio. After the fire, her work developed an autobiographical tendency.^[9]

Smail taught at the Johannesburg College of Art, the University of the Witwatersrand and at the Maryland Institute College of Art.^[9]

Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art,^[10] the Johannesburg Art Museum,^[11] the National Gallery of South Africa^[11] among other venues. In 1996 she received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship.^[11]

Smail is married to Julien Davis, a research scientist and photographer.^[2] In 2000, she suffered a stroke and lost the ability to walk and speak. She continued to make art beginning with drawings and paintings that depicted "silence and sounds that became a new kind of language." She later regained her mobility and the ability to speak.^[3]