Victoria Smits
Victoria L. Smits is an interdisciplinary artist living in Eugene, Oregon. She holds a BA in English, art, and secondary education from Calvin College and an MA in English Education from the University of Buffalo with a concentration in creative writing. She taught middle school for two years in Los Angeles and high school art and English for 18 years in New York and Michigan. Her practice is driven by research on her life, questioning the residual reverberations of a rigid and frugal childhood where a scarcity mentality provided a framework for existence. Victoria explores theoretical and historic constructs of the maternal to form a matricentric feminism - empowerment in opposition to hegemonic ideologies of mothering. She analyzes how internalized beliefs about self, identity, and empowerment are carried from parent to child. These visual explorations are a quest for understanding and agency, where text and visual converge, where science and cheesecloth hold hands, where the abstraction of the natural environment intersects with the maternal, where a woman can be an artist, mother, and human in one day. Victoria will be graduating with an MFA in Studio at the School of Art Institute of Chicago in 2023
