Emily Mae Smith

Smith was born in 1979 in Austin, Texas. She earned a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002, receiving the Roy Crane Award on graduation, then moved to New York on an Edward Mazzella Jr. Scholarship to complete an MFA in Visual Art at Columbia University in 2006. Her first solo exhibition, The Love Below, opened in 2005 at Marvelli Gallery in New York.

Over the following decade she developed the pictorial language for which she is best known: dense, cartoon-inflected oil paintings built around a recurring anthropomorphic broom figure that stands in for female subjectivity and labor, staged in compositions that borrow from Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Surrealism, Pop art, and commercial illustration. She showed with a succession of New York and European galleries, including Laurel Gitlen, Simone Subal, Mary Mary in Glasgow, and Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels, before her 2019 exhibition Matrix 181 at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, her first solo museum exhibition in the United States. She received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting in 2018. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Critical writing on Smith centers on her broom avatar as a device for rewriting art history from a feminist vantage point, recasting a domestic, gendered tool as an active heroine inside compositions that quote Symbolist and Surrealist painting, Art Nouveau ornament, and commercial illustration. That reading was made explicit around 2024 to 2025, when the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium paired her work directly with paintings by Rene Magritte in Brussels, treating her as a contemporary heir to Belgian Surrealism. Her institutional trajectory, from a 2019 solo museum debut at the Wadsworth Atheneum to holdings at the Whitney, LACMA, MOCA Los Angeles, and the Hirshhorn, has reinforced a critical consensus that she is a significant figure in the recent revival of narrative, art-historically literate figuration.

Smith's auction market has developed gradually alongside her gallery program. Her highest recorded auction price is for Feast and Famine, at approximately USD 1,361,000; the auction house and exact sale date for that result are not consistently reported in public sources, so it should be treated as provisional pending further confirmation. According to the analytics service HENI, her work has generated about USD 13.91 million in cumulative auction sales over the past eleven years. She is represented by Petzel in New York and Perrotin in Paris, Tokyo, and New York, and has shown repeatedly with Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin.

No catalogue raisonne has been published for Smith, and there is no certificate-of-authenticity program; works are best verified through her representing galleries and the artist's studio. Her auction record remains modest relative to blue-chip contemporary painters, and much of her market activity runs through primary gallery sales rather than the secondary market, so a single strong or weak result at auction can move the average significantly. Her expanding museum collection base is the clearest signal of long-term institutional support, and collectors should weigh that against a still comparatively thin and, at the very top end, incompletely documented public sales record.