Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2019

Publication Title

Journal of Latino/Latin American Studies

Volume

10

Issue

1

First Page

181

Last Page

200

Abstract

I met artist Rachel Smith in Walla Walla, Washington. As a Visiting Spanish Professor at Whitman College, I was teaching Art, Lyric and Verse courses, and had visited various times the Whitman College Sheehan Gallery on campus and engaged with several local artists. It was at an off-campus event, Art Walla Popup Gallery, that I viewed some of Smith’s 6x6 panels of artwork. Intrigued by her story as a United States citizen of Cuban descent artist, I interviewed Smith on three different occasions in 2016 and 2017, and shared her work in a presentation at the Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social 2016 conference in Laramie, Wyoming. Having grown up in Miami for the first thirteen years of her life, she now considers Walla Walla, a small eastern Washington town of approximately 31,700, her home. In addition to being a practicing artist and advocate for the arts, Rachel Smith is a professor at Colombia Basin College and owns and operates her own Screen Printing Company, Orcis Clothing, in Walla Walla. She claims that her work is about removing herself from the other, becoming the other, and realizing that we are all similar or all the other, simultaneously. Smith’s Cuban background and Scandinavian (Danish) physical characteristics brings her to the forefront of a “not necessarily a woman of color artist” but a consciously aware driven artist. Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, she admits that in the past four to five years she has appropriated her Cuban consciousness, and that her art is of the banal aspects of life. Smith’s impactful art attracted me to inquire about her creativity: United States cultural aspects, gender and Cuba diaspora themes in her artwork, music inspirations and performance pieces.

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