Balancing Act, a new exhibition by Kansas City–based artist Debra Smith, whose work continues a family lineage of textile knowledge passed down through three generations. Smith’s grandmother and mother both worked with cloth in ways that shaped her earliest understanding of material, labor and care. Their influence remains present in her studio today as a lived inheritance of attention, skill and respect for the makers who came before.
Smith works with vintage kimono and obi textiles, contemporary silks and other fabrics collected over many years through travel, exploration and relationships with people who understood her deep connection to cloth. Her introduction to Japanese textiles began in her youth while working at Asiatica in Kansas City, where she learned to recognize the cultural history and technical mastery held within these materials. That early experience continues to guide her approach. When she cuts and reconfigures the cloth, she follows the grain, the tension and the history inside the textile.
Balancing Act emerges from a year marked by instability and shifting conditions. Smith describes the studio as the place where she tries to slow down enough to listen. The work is not about achieving steadiness, but about searching for it within circumstances that refuse to hold still.
This year she has been thinking about desire paths, cairns and wayfinding. These quiet systems of orientation appear throughout the exhibition as metaphors for how people navigate uncertainty when official routes fail. The compositions come together through fragments that lean, settle and test their place. Many of the pieces feel as if they are still shifting, reflecting the time in which they are being made.
Silver obi, the long sash worn with kimono, appears throughout the exhibition as a deliberate act of hope. The silver catches light and redirects it, marking the possibility of a way forward.
A selection of works from Smith’s earlier series Walking in Traffic is included in the exhibition. That series marked the moment when trust entered her practice in a deeper way and explored how to move through uncertainty. Balancing Act carries that trust into the present and stays open to the possibility of new forms, new balance and new ways forward.
Balancing Act affirms Smith’s place within a lineage of women who worked with cloth before her. The exhibition honors their influence while charting a path that is distinctly her own.
Exhibition Dates: Opening 6-8 PM on June 26th – show runs thru August
Location: Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, 179 10th Ave, New York, NY 10011
MORE INFO: https://www.markelfinearts.com/