Is it finally time for Mimi Smith to get her due? The 82-year-old feminist artist’s mini retrospective at Art Basel Miami Beach with Luis De Jesus Los Angeles fittingly features a suite of sculptures made from clocks, with references to pressing social issues added to each hour.

In Woman’s Work is Never Done, Health (1995), the times on the pink clock point to “domestic voilence” [sic], breast cancer, and abortion rights and safety, among other critical items. The clock works date to the 1980s and ’90s, but women’s issues have been at the heart of Smith’s practice for decades, dating back to her early works in the 1960s.

“She was the first artist to exhibit clothing as sculpture—she did that in the ’60s,” gallery director Brianne Bakke told me.

The dealer was showing Smith’s later installation Slave Ready: Corporate (1991–93), a “dress for success” women’s suit with a steel wool collar and cuffs, displayed next to a gray painting reading “slave ready.” Women, of course, are often still responsible for all the cooking and cleaning, even when they have high-powered careers.

Mimi Smith, Slave Ready: Corporate (1991–93). Photo courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

For her part, Smith remained dedicated to her art practice even while raising small children. Much of the Art Basel booth is dedicated to her “Television Drawings,” which were inspired by watching and listening to the daily news while taking care of her kids at home in the 1970s and ’80s.

“I began to do these drawings because the constant information of the world invading my studio and home was not avoidable,” Smith said in a statement. “However, I was still involved with the basic theory of relating my work to experiences in a society that are shared by many people.”

She would transcribe excerpts from the morning and evening broadcasts onto simple line drawings of a television screen. There’s some sense of humor to the pieces, like the one repeating “please get up, have a good day.”

Mimi Smith, September 29th, 1982, 11 pm, Can’t Sleep Tight (diptych with audio), 1982. Photo courtesy of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

“She’s critiquing the sincerity of the news coming into someone’s home and saying ‘good morning’ and ‘have a nice day,’ that’s impersonal but personal,” Bakke said.

Each piece is also a little time capsule, such as a work made the night of Jimmy Carter’s victory in the 1976 election. The piece Can’t Sleep Tonight, on the other hand, is full of depressing news items about fires, toxic waste, and the U.S. building up its weapons arsenal. (It’s a diptych, and the second part is a soothing lullaby reading “good night, good dreams, go to bed.”)

Mimi Smith, Woman’s Work is Never Done, Health (1995). Photo courtesy of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

“A lot of these messages stay relevant today, but the technology is aging,” Bakke said.

Smith, who still lives and works in New York City, has shown her work periodically over the years. She was notably included in the Connie Butler–curated “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution” at the Museum of Contemporary, Art Los Angeles in 2007, and has work in the collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, among other institutions.

Mimi Smith, A Reading of Two Drawings 1978 Franklin Furnace. Photo courtesy of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

But like so many women artists of her era, Smith hasn’t gotten the recognition she arguably deserves—the last time the “Television Drawings” had a dedicated show was at the Art Center Waco in Texas, in 1980.

At the fair, Luis de Jesus had priced the work at $15,000 to $60,000 and was fielding institutional interest: “We’re still waiting.”

“Mimi Smith: Breaking News” is on view at Art Basel Miami Beach, with Luis de Jesus Los Angeles, Survey Section, Booth S11, at the Miami Beach Convention Center, 1901 Convention Center Drive, Miami Beach, Florida, December 4–8, 2024.