Jo Smail: Thinking Like an Oyster is an Exhibition Catalogue with Essays by Curator Amy Eva Raehse, Artist Louis Fratino, and Art Historian Kristen Hileman. Baltimore-based South African artist Jo Smail (b. 1943, Durban, South Africa) is internationally cel- ebrated for her abstract paintings, drawings, installa- tions, collages, and prints. Her works are often built through layered processes of accumulation, erasure, repurposing and revision—material transformations that mirror the emotional and historical depth of her subject matter. Educated in South Africa, Smail relocated to Baltimore in 1985. From 1988 to 2017 she taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she is now Professor Emeritus. A dedicated educator as well as a pioneering artist, Smail has profoundly influenced generations of artists at formative moments in their careers, from fellow South African artist William Kentridge, with whom Smail has collaborated, to rising superstars like Louis Fratino, and many others. Her practice is deeply informed by personal and collective histories, navigating memory, displacement, resilience, and reinvention. Formal experimentation and material invention in her work are inseparable from lived experience. Smail’s art has been shaped by formative events including apartheid-era South Africa, a devastating Baltimore studio fire in 1995, and a life-altering stroke in 2000. These experiences, alongside her engagement with the natural world, the socio-political resonance of found materials, and art historical traditions, have contributed to a body of work that is at once intimate and globally resonant. In March 2020, Smail was the subject of a major retrospective at the Baltimore Museum of Art, marking her first comprehensive one-person museum exhibition and affirming her significant contributions to contemporary abstraction. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions and major publications, with reviews appearing in The New York Times, Art in America, The Hudson Review, The Baltimore Sun, and The Washington Post, among others. She has received numerous awards and residencies, including the Trawick Sapphire Prize, Maryland State Arts Council Awards, a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellowship, the Rochefort-en-Terre Residency in France, a Pollock- Krasner Foundation Grant, and a nomination for Anonymous Was A Woman. Smail’s work is held in public and private collections internationally, including the Baltimore Museum of Art; the National Gallery of South Africa; the Johannesburg Art Museum; the Pretoria Art Museum; the Durban Art Gallery; the University of the Witwatersrand; Johns Hopkins University; and major corporate collections in both South Africa and the United States. She is represented in the United States by Goya Contemporary Gallery.