Alexis Smith, The Holy Road
Written by USU Student Nick Lammay
May 20, 2016
Alexis Smith (born 1949) is an assemblage and collage artist working in Los Angeles,
California. Smith attended the University of California, Irvine under the instruction of world renowned artist Robert Irwin and Vija Clemins
and graduated with a BA in 1970. Upon graduation Smith’s work quickly became associated
with West Coast Assemblage Art and Beat Culture, grouping her with artists such as
Edward Kienholz, Wallace Berman and Bruce Conner. Smith considers herself a product
of Hollywood, often pairing leftovers of Tinsel Town kitsch—recycled thrift-store
book jackets, advertisements, and Hollywood memorabilia—with snippets of folk wisdom
and homespun clichés.
The Holy Road is a collage, consisting of found objects, confined within the boundaries of large
wooden picture frame. Thick, wavy black stripes made of a felt like material, suggests
tire treads as they run diagonally over the frame onto the collage. This makes the
frame as important as what it contains. The background is made of car ads, maps and
newspaper clippings about new roads being built. One of the few areas with color is
a print of the Virgin Mary and Child, placed in the upper left portion of the collage,
overlapped slightly by the black stripes. Two plastic snakes appear to be moving across
the newspaper clippings, taking the viewers eye to points of interest, one even making
its way onto the frame. In the upper right corner a quote reading “Whats your road,
man? holybly road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road, It’s an anywhere road for anybody
anyhow” is illustrated in gold.
Inspiration for "The Holy Road" came from Smith’s reading of Jack Kerouac’s beatnik
classic On the Road, a semi-autobiographical novel about Kerouac’s travels with another
Beat literary, Neal Cassady. The book looks at traditional Western Christian ideas
of the promised land and how people leave one place in search of someplace better.[3]
Smith, fascinated by this search for a promised land, appropriated Kerouac’s ideas
of a religious journey into her collage.
This month's From the Vault is part of an object-based research assignment from Professor
Marissa Vigneault's course ARTH 4900-4900 Curating as Art history, Art History as
Curating.

Alexis Smith
American, b. 1949
Holy Road, 1988
Mixed media
39 x 32 inches
Gift of the Marie Eccles Caine Foundation