ART : Sizing Up Alexis Smith : The artist balances ‘the minute and the humongous’ in her intimate collages and large-scale public works

“I get a huge kick out of what I do. I like doing it. I like it when it’s finished, and that’s carried me through the years,” said artist Alexis Smith during an interview in her Venice studio.

What’s this? A happy artist? Yes, but not a complacent one. The fun of Smith’s art-making cannot be entirely cracked up to amusing subject matter. It’s also a product of her roll-with-the-punches temperament and hard-won self-confidence.

“I went through a catharsis when I was about 35, and I decided that it’s just as well to assume you are good because you will never know during your lifetime. It takes such a load off to assume you are good and just put one foot forward,” she said.

The 41-year-old artist has been putting one foot in front of the other--with uncommon grace, wit and daring--since she graduated from UC Irvine in 1970. She quickly gained critical acclaim for delicate narrative collages that had viewers pressing their noses to her work to see feathery details and to read literary passages. Expanding into large public works in 1981, she has subsequently delighted in balancing “the minute and the humongous”--as she terms the two aspects of her art.

Smith has been in the public eye for nearly two decades, but her following has been firmly grounded in Los Angeles. “I always thought of myself as a big frog in a little pond,” she said.

Not any more. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York has scheduled a retrospective exhibition of her work on Sept. 27-Dec. 1, an honor that puts Smith in a league with the nation’s most highly revered artists. (The show will travel, but the itinerary has not been completed, according to the museum’s press office.) Last month, her smiling face lit up the cover of Artnews, a highly visible New York magazine. Now represented in New York by dealer Josh Baer, she has received favorable press in the Big Apple.

Meanwhile, in Southern California Smith’s star shines brighter than ever. Two major public projects are in process: an outdoor “Snake Path” on the UC San Diego campus and floors for a major addition to the Los Angeles Convention Center. A pair of exhibitions of her work open coincidentally on Saturday. One, “Alexis Smith: Public Works,” at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Gallery (through Feb. 24), is a 10-year survey of her large public projects, documented by photographs, drawings and models. The other, “20th-Century Collage,” includes her new work in a historical group show at the Margo Leavin Gallery in West Hollywood (through Feb. 16).

Her narrative art--based on popular culture--has been surprisingly consistent, despite vast leaps of scale. “I think my work hangs together. It usually revolves around a sub-text of some sort--a quote or a myth, something recognizable from our culture,” she said.

“The form almost always alludes to something everyday, something found, whether it’s picked up off the street or bought at a swap meet. I collect everywhere I go, and I like to work with everyday life forms as opposed to high-art forms. Also, there is often an emotional poignancy to my work. It’s uncynical. It’s very of-the-world,” she continued.

Long established as a leader among artists who combine the visual with the verbal, Smith has based collages on Raymond Chandler mysteries, famous women named Jane and the opera “Madame Butterfly.” A large installation made in 1981 for Otis Art Institute (now Otis/Parsons) was inspired by “Porgy and Bess.” Jack Kerouac’s novel, “On the Road,” provided the literary seed for “The Same Old Paradise,” a 60-foot mural displayed in 1987-88 at the Brooklyn Museum.

Large or small, her work “leaves a lot of room for interpretation,” Smith said. “It’s not propaganda. There’s no prescribed way of looking at it. I’m not judging society in any way. I want people to zero in on a complex truth that involves reconciling opposites.”

Her literary bent suggests that her work always starts with text, but that isn’t the case. “I work in all different ways. For the ‘On the Road’ pieces, I free associated with the text,” she said. But she is often inspired by objects, images or little piles of junk that accumulate in her studio.

What can’t be disputed is that Smith has an active imagination and a penchant for fantasy, as well as enormous energy and determination. Naturally attractive, she tops off a wiry, athletic build with warm brown eyes and loosely curled hair. Her direct manner has the equivocal edge of an artist who gets to the point through poetic metaphors.

And she isn’t opposed to taking liberties with facts that are presented to her. Born Patricia Ann Smith, she changed her first name when she was a teen-ager. Alexis had a nice ring to it, and when she heard of a movie star by the same name, “It was Kismet,” she said. The daughter of a psychiatrist, she grew up around a mental hospital in Norwalk, but that experience seems to have had no clear impact on a healthy body of work that spins fantasies from popular culture.

After finishing her undergraduate work at UC Irvine in 1970--then a hot new school--Smith moved to Venice and has been there ever since. The anonymous storefront studio she has occupied for nearly two decades has acquired an air of lived-in austerity. Found treasures are crammed into neat rows of plastic shoe boxes; papers and photographs are stashed away in Manila envelopes in a metal storage cabinet. A casual assembly of overstuffed furniture, throw rugs, drawing boards and works in progress seems as unpretentious as the artist.

Smith has given up teaching, except “in small doses.” Pressured by demands of her public projects, she resigned at UCLA in 1988 after a decade of teaching there. But last summer she accepted a job at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. (That temporary post doubled as a honeymoon for Smith and Scott Grieger, an artist and chairman of fine arts at Otis/Parsons, whom she married in June.) She won’t take on any new public projects until after the Whitney retrospective, however the UC San Diego project looms large. Drawings of the “Snake Path” currently occupy a central position in the studio, along with samples of slate tiles to be used for the outdoor walkway. Installation of the project, which will be added to the Stuart Collection’s exemplary selection of site-specific artworks, is slated to begin this spring or summer--after completion of an underground addition to the central library, a William Pereira-designed building that has been likened to a space ship.

Smith’s $300,000 path--now in final stages of fund-raising--is the most expensive work in the Stuart Collection, according to Mary Beebe, director of the collection. That distinction was formerly claimed by Bruce Nauman’s $240,000 neon work, “Vices and Virtues,” which flashes 7-foot words from the top of the Charles Lee Powell Structural Systems Laboratory.

“I started talking about doing a piece there four years ago. Originally I wanted to do a garden of some kind,” Smith said. But the image of a snake--which appeared in “The Same Old Paradise” mural--eventually took over as the motif of a 10-foot-wide, 500-foot-long path that loops around a miniature Garden of Eden.

The snake-shaped walkway, with each scale formed of a separate slate tile, will extend down a hill from the university’s central library to the engineering building. With its head embedded in the plaza of the library, the tricolor reptile will wind around two apple trees in the little garden, then serpentine down the embankment. About halfway down the path, viewers will discover a 7-foot stone book with “Paradise Lost” engraved on its spine. A quote from Milton--”And wilt thou not be loathe to leave this paradise, but shalt possess a paradise within thee happier far”--will appear on one side of the volume. “It’s a metaphor for having knowledge and leaving the university,” Smith said.

“We’re very excited about the project,” Beebe said. “Alexis’ work fits conceptually with the library because she has always been interested in literature. The path has the energy of a snake going up a hill, not just a garden hose lying still.” Smith’s other current public project in Southern California is even more ambitious. As one of three artists (with Matt Mullican and Larry Bell) selected to create works for a new section of the Los Angeles Convention Center, Smith has designed two lobby floors. Her project was recently put out to bid, but it will probably not be complete for two or three years.

A 50,000-square-foot terrazzo floor for the South Lobby will depict an enormous map of the Pacific Rim, projected (and distorted) to fit the shape of the floor, Smith said. “It will be enormously abstract, but you will recognize places you know.” Medallions containing ethnic design motifs from peoples of the Pacific Rim will be superimposed on the water and land masses. All the motifs are based on waves, spirals or wheels, which were chosen for their visual similarity, she said. On the terrazzo floor of the smaller, 30,000-square-foot West Lobby, an image of the edge of the world will lead into a night sky with white stars and red dotted lines for constellations.

Asked how she finds such complex projects, Smith said, “I never seek out anything. They just come to me, but I’m willing to do anything.” She was invited to do her first public piece in 1981, a wall painting and collage for Unity Savings in West Hollywood. “At that time, the public art field was really wide open. Once you had completed any project at all, it was fairly easy to get more,” she said. “After the bank piece, I did a huge piece for a performing arts center in Grand Rapids, Mich. That suggested that I might be able and crazy enough to do anything.”

Many artists have had a go at public work during the 1980s, but Smith estimates that only about 30 artists worldwide are qualified to do big, complicated projects. “Relative to the art world in general, the field is still pretty wide open because it is so difficult. Public art is rewarding because it goes out into the world and the work is accessible to a huge number of people, but it’s very stressful,” she said. “You have to deal with a lot of real-world problems: the politics of changes in governmental administrations, extreme expenses, such things as wheelchair access. Public projects can go on forever, with one crisis after another. They aren’t for the faint of heart.”

Subject matter and imagery also present problems. “It’s hard to make good public art because you need a basic, comprehensible meaning that seems relevant, neat and magical to people who don’t know anything about art. At the same time, the work has to fit with the currents of art history and the definitions of your own body of work. It has to have a level of meaning and intelligence for sophisticated art people,” she said.

“Also, the work has to be virtually indestructible, so you have to be flexible about your ideas and materials. When you get into public art, you want your work to hold up for all eternity. I had to change from paper and paint to bronze, terrazzo and slate,” she said.

Despite these challenges, Smith views her shift from small to large and from private to public as “a natural progression” and a beneficial move. “If you want to know the truth, I got more confident from working in large scale and with permanent materials. My collages got more authoritative and I think it helped the market for them,” she said. “You have more control over studio work, but the down side is that sometimes you are the only one who wants it.”

Pleased that “a lot of threads” of her work are finally pulling together, Smith credits Los Angeles dealer Leavin with persuading some of the right people to take her work more seriously and with winning wider recognition for her art. But the concept of sudden success remains a little baffling to Smith. Her interpretation of the phenomenon: “You stay the same and everyone else changes.”