Roxa Smith (b. 1962, Caracas, Venezuela) is a Brooklyn-based artist working in painting, collage, and embroidery. She earned a BA in Art History and German from Bowdoin College and a postgraduate degree in Fine Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
In California, she was an active participant in a group of plein air painters led by Lundy Siegrist. The group cemented her love of painting, and she focused on landscape until she moved to New York City in 1991.
In the 1990s, she found New York’s landscape less inspiring than California’s and turned to painting people’s interiors, which were full of life and color. Over the years she explored other subjects, including Animals in Interiors, Mindscapes, and Toys and Robots, but her love of interpreting everyday contemporary life has always anchored her work. Drawing on her Venezuelan heritage, her paintings have evolved into familiar yet idiosyncratic reconsiderations of space, with saturated color, intricate patterns, and an aesthetic influenced by naïve and outsider art.
Besides painting, Smith has explored paper collage on the themes of chairs and bicycles. Since the pandemic, she has made a series of flower works that combine acrylic painting with embroidery stitched into the painted canvas.
Smith’s exhibitions include three shows at C24 Gallery in New York (November 2025–February 2026, March 2023, and a sold-out show in 2022) and the featured-artist exhibition The Language of Chairs at the Museum of Pocket Art in Austin, TX (2023). Her work has also been exhibited at Morgan Lehman Gallery (NYC), Bernay Fine Art (Great Barrington, MA), The Focus Gallery at the Sheldon Museum (Lincoln, NE), The Roger Smith Hotel (NYC), Kenise Barnes Fine Arts (Larchmont, NY), the Condé Nast lobby (NYC), George Billis Gallery (NYC and LA), and Visage Arte Contemporaneo (Panama).
Notable awards include the Arts to Hearts Project Merit Award (2025), Best in Show at the Color Competition at Artist Space Gallery (2024), an Artist Grant from the Vermont Studio Center (2020), finalist for the MTA Arts and Design commission (2017), the NYFA–Sheldon Museum Fellowship (2013), and a NYFA painting fellowship (2012).
Smith’s work has been featured in publications including Arts to Hearts Magazine’s 100 Emerging Artists of 2025, Contemporary Collage Magazine (2024), I Like Your Work (Fall 2024, Spring 2023), The Brooklyn Rail (2023), Interlocutor and Viceversa Magazine (2022), Studio Visit Magazine (2025, 2021, 2015, 2011), Artspace (2019), The New York Times (2015), New American Paintings (2012), and HuffPost (2012).




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Roxa Smith