Smith, Emily Mae: - Emily Mae Smith was born in Austin, Texas in 1979 and received her MFA at Columbia University, New York and her BFA at the University of Texas, Austin, Texas. Smith's sly, humorous, and riveting compositions nod to art historical movements such as Symbolism and Art Nouveau, though with a distinctly 21st-century spin. Her genre-defying paintings speak through a vocabulary of signs and symbols addressing timely subjects including gender, class, and violence. Smith's paintings tackle art history's phallocentric myths and create imagery for subjectivities absent in visual culture, specifically the feminist perspective. Emily Mae Smith currently lives and works in New York.