b. 1972, Manassas, Virginia. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

With her particular interest in folk craft and historical re-enactment, artist Allison Smith produces artwork that revisits the past in hopes of better understanding the present. Past projects have included her 2005 event, The Muster, which rallied hundreds of participants to set up camp on New York’s Governors Island and Notion Nanny (2005-2007), in which she traveled across the U.K. and U.S. as an itinerant apprentice, swapping folk crafts and trades with their modern day practitioners.

Allison Smith developed her project The Donkey, The Jackass, and the Mule for the parade during a year-long collaboration with the Herron School of Art & Design and the Freetown Village Living History Museum. Smith, who has used the iconography of historical reenactment in previous works, built a fable of her own making in the form of three equestrian sculptures, which became the backdrop for a performative protest led by the actors of Freetown Village, a living history museum that depicts the lives and stories of post-Civil War African American settlements in Indiana. For the performance, the group produced a reenactment of a reenactment that they had originally performed during Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign. Here, a historical rally to give women the right to vote was juxtaposed directly against current events, with Indiana being the focus of Presidential campaigns by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. For both Smith and the re-enactors of Freetown Village, the interpretation of history is used as a device to elucidate the present.

Image Credit:
Portrait of Allison Smith

Photo by Allison Smith and Michelle
Pemberton. Commissioned by the
Indianapolis Museum of Art