Harvard Art Museums > 2009.53: Stairs Drawings Collections Search Exit Deep Zoom Mode Zoom Out Zoom In Reset Zoom Full Screen Add to Collection Order Image Copy Link Copy Citation Citation"Stairs (Mimi Smith) , 2009.53,” Harvard Art Museums collections online, Apr 19, 2024, https://hvrd.art/o/331589. Reuse via IIIF Toggle Deep Zoom Mode Download This object does not yet have a description. Identification and Creation Object Number 2009.53 People Mimi Smith, American (Brookline, MA born 1942) Title Stairs Classification Drawings Work Type drawing Date 1974 Culture American Persistent Link https://hvrd.art/o/331589 Physical Descriptions Medium Knotted thread, tape measures, eyelets Dimensions 266.7 x 121.9 cm (105 x 48 in.) Provenance Recorded Ownership History Collection of the artist, sold; [through Anna Kustera Gallery]; to Harvard Art Museum, March 2009. Acquisition and Rights Credit Line Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Margaret Fisher Fund Copyright © 1974 Mimi Smith Accession Year 2009 Object Number 2009.53 Division Modern and Contemporary Art Contact am_moderncontemporary@harvard.edu Permissions The Harvard Art Museums encourage the use of images found on this website for personal, noncommercial use, including educational and scholarly purposes. To request a higher resolution file of this image, please submit an online request. Descriptions Commentary In 1972 Mimi Smith moved, with her husband and small children, to a suburban neighborhood in Cleveland. Describing feelings of entrapment (she had begun her career as an artist in NY), Smith began to measure the contents and rooms of her domestic space. Translating these measurements into thread, which she knotted obsessively, and tape measures Smith, who referred to these works as drawings, began to enact conceptual art's affection for measurement and precision within the domestic sphere. Like Sylvia Plimack Mangold's paintings of her domestic interior these drawings explore the "trick" of perspective by showing the contradiction between actual measurement and the appearance of objects in space. Cleaving open the space between "reality" and "representation" can be seen in this context to have as much to do with Mel Bochner's exercises in measurement as they do with the feminist agenda of bringing reality and representation into a closer proximity to one another. "Stairs" is a classic work of Smith's evoking not only receding space, but space upwards, as well as access to another plane (i.e. another floor). In this regard its play with space is quite fanciful-albeit lonely in their evocation of a staircase to nowhere. But the work also plays with the tradition of trompe l'oeil, tricking the eye into a belief in a space not present. Despite the works playfulness, the emotional connotation of the work is vexed-the knotted thread speaks to a kind of obsessive, mindless activity (Smith was to make the analogy between knotting and housework) and the stairs (and other pieces of furniture meticulously made by Smith) have a kind of stark emptiness that subtly undermine the so-called American dream of a house in the suburb being the embodiment of fulfillment. In Smith's case it appears rather as an empty shell. Publication History Uber die Kleidung, die durch das Lebenbegleitet: Ein Gesprach mit Mimi Smith von Heinz-Norb, Titel (Germany), p. 154, ill. Lisa Gabrielle Mark, ed., WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA and London, 2007), p. 55, 303, ill. Exhibition History 32Q: 1120 Contemporary Art, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, 08/10/2017 - 03/15/2018 Subjects and Contexts Collection Highlights Verification Level This record has been reviewed by the curatorial staff but may be incomplete. Our records are frequently revised and enhanced. For more information please contact the Division of Modern and Contemporary Art at am_moderncontemporary@harvard.edu
