Biographical Statement
A. Lilia Smith is a clinical psychologist and artist residing in Miami, Florida. She was born in Cuba and has lived in the United States since 1967. California was her home for more than thirty years.
She is represented by Artmedia Gallery in Miami, where she had her first solo exhibit. Her work has been shown at Art Boca and Art Palm Beach during their annual art fairs.
Smith is a fine art photographer with a long-standing history of involvement with the arts. Beginning in the late 1970’s and through the 1980’s, she practiced photography, painting, dance, and writing. During those years she dedicated herself to study art, anthropology, philosophy, and the psychology of creativity.
Her artistic pursuits led her back into the discipline of psychology, which had been her career intention from the start. She took a detour away from making art in order to procure a doctorate degree in the field. For more than twenty years, her clinical work has nourished and sustained her creative impulse, for she views creativity as an inherited component in all human aims. Her strong desire to create works of art was never quenched and the passage of time impressed upon her the urgency to once again engage in this process. It is through the medium of photographic-image-making that she hopes for a dialogue with her audience.
Smith describes her art-making approach as follows:
"In my work as a psychologist and artist, I fluctuate between two tendencies or impulses. One is logical and empirical, the other intuitive and expressive. Driven by my curiosity about the natural world, along with my passionate quest for a greater understanding of our human condition, I am always ready to immerse myself in the creative process. Oscillating between both inclinations is how I delve into the questions of origin, purpose, and meaning.
It is from the depth of my experiences, memories, and reflections and from a life lived with intention, that my images emerge from. They symbolize an artistic idiom representing both the personal and the universal as I see and experience them."