Green Insect, 2009 Acrylic on steel. Photos courtesy of the artist.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced that Rebecca Smith is one of ten artists to receive a 2012 award in art. The awards, which were established in 1941,  are given annually  “to artists, architects, composers, and writers, to honor and encourage them in their creative work,” and  honor both established and emerging artists.

The members of this year’s award selection committee were Lois Dodd, Wolf Kahn, Alex Katz, Malcolm Morley, Thomas Nozkowski, Judy Pfaff, Dorothea Rockburne, Peter Saul, and Joel Shapiro (Chairman).

Smith’s award includes a monetary prize of $7,500.  A resident of New York and Bolton Landing,  Smith was born in 1954, in Glens Falls, the daughter of the writer Jean Freas and the artist David Smith.   She grew up in Washington, D.C. and Bolton Landing, and attended Sarah Lawrence College and The New York Studio School.

First exhibiting in 1977,  Smith has been making art since the late 1970s, in various media including painting, performance, sculpture and tape drawing installations.

Smith is known today for two distinct but related bodies of work: sculpture and color tape drawings.

One installation of color tape applied directly to the wall  titled “Between Two Things” was exhibited at the Lake George Arts Project’s  Courthouse Gallery in 2001.

Her  Cage sculptures, which are welded steel grid forms, built out from the wall and constructed of interwoven bars of steel, have been exhibited widely.

Her work can be found in many private and public collections, including the Albright-Knox Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Microsoft Collection and the TarraWarra Museum, Australia.