Victoria Smits is an artist, writer, educator, and researcher. Her interdisciplinary practice functions as performative dissonance to her upbringing in a rigid religious home focused on intellectual and theological systems of thinking and being in the world. While the iconographic nature of this existence readied her with a deeply symbolic way of thinking, an active and nurtured passion for inquiry, and a broad responsibility toward seeing and valuing others, she has left the nefarious aspects of this structure behind. Her visual explorations are a quest for informed consciousness, percipience, and agency, where text and visual converge, where science and cheesecloth hold hands, where the abstraction of the natural environment intersects with the maternal, where a woman can be a human-artist-mother in one day. She analyzes how internalized beliefs about self, identity, and empowerment are carried from parent to child and driven by hegemonic systems.
Smits’s engagement with multiple media originates in her childhood in upstate New York, where she had access to streams, forests, fields, and two giant willow trees in her backyard. Nature was her first studio. She would aggregate, design, and construct — small grass weavings, drawings of dandelions in their seed state, forts in her backyard cherry tree, found log bridges across creeks, and compositions of moss, leaves, and sticks. This ebullient freedom is the essence of Smits’s practice today. She integrates the plausibility of strife and discord as moments of evolution and growth.
Victoria Smits lives and works in Eugene, Oregon. She was born in Chicago, Illinois and spent most of her childhood in Rochester, New York. She has also lived in Los Angeles, Michigan, and Guyuk, Nigeria. Victoria studied English, art, and secondary education at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan and received a Masters in English Education with a concentration in creative writing from University of Buffalo. After her extensive career in art and English education, she embraced a full-time art practice and has exhibited nationally and internationally. She graduated with her MFA in Studio through the School of Art Institute of Chicago in 2023.
*I acknowledge that my home is located on Kalapuya Ilihi, the traditional indigenous homeland of the Kalapuya people. Following treaties between 1851 and 1855, Kalapuya people were dispossessed of their indigenous homeland by the United States government and forcibly removed to the Coast Reservation in Western Oregon. I recognize and honor the Kalapuya people as past, present, and future caretakers of this land.