Smith began life in Nashville in 1869, then moved with her family five years later down to Hope, Arkansas, where the Andersons lived on land presently at the intersection of South Main and East Third that extended from where First Baptist Church is today to First Presbyterian Church’s current location. Her father had a drug store in town.
During her days in Hope, Smith discovered drawing and painting. At age 25, her father having died and the family home having been destroyed by the 1893 tornado that reportedly left 75 percent of the young town’s residents homeless, Smith moved to Arizona to join her brother George’s family as one of the first European Americans to settle in that territory.
She was enabled by marriage to her mining company executive second husband (her first had died within three months of the wedding of tuberculosis) to travel to California for lessons with other landscapists.
Smith was a prolific painter, using a more acute form of Monet’s Impressionism to depict mountainous and austere landscapes she found in her long life in Arizona. Her work would be exhibited in her lifetime in such cities as New York, Philadelphia and Washington D.C.
Steven Carlson, who came to possess several of her paintings by inheriting them from family members--he is a great grandnephew of Smith explained his great great aunt’s significance in the history of art in Arizona. “I have really made an effort to try to find another artist that was living full time in Arizona before her that was a woman, and I can't find that there was.” But after that, came numerous women artists in the state, many undoubtedly influenced by Smith.
Viewers will be most struck by her knack for depicting the violet quality of light as the sun descends on rocky, desert landscapes, including the Grand Canyon as well as several other scenes in the American Southwest.
Today, the SWAAC Gallery will open at 10:00 a.m. and close at 2:00 p.m. Tomorrow the gallery will open at 1:00 p.m. and close at 5:00 p.m. The Smith exhibition will appear with more paintings than at the Hope showing in Arkadelphia Arts Center which continues Tuesday 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m., Wednesday, and Thursday 10:00 am.-3:00 p.m.
