Sans titre

Smith accompanied her portraits with unintelligible inscriptions and slogans.

Born with defective hearing into a sharecropper family in the "Deep South" of the United States, Mary T. Smith had difficulty making herself understood and her family believed she was ill. After a lifetime of hard work in still-segregationist America, she moved to Hazlehurst (Mississippi) to raise her son alone. When she reached retirement age, she began to paint portraits reminiscent of Byzantine icons, representing those around her, allegorical figures and Christ. Her supposed madness and the messages she chose to render incomprehensible were her guarantee of peace and protection in her community.