We are so psyched to announce Baltimore Fishbowl’s newest resident artist, Julia Kim Smith, a conceptual visionary whose work explores identity, memory and the artistic, social and political landscape. Julia is an interdisciplinary maker, switching deftly between performance, video, film, photography, and printmaking.

We love the way Julia’s images make us think, shudder and laugh, sometimes all at once. Recently, her amusing Shepard Fairey-esque tribute to Tiger Mother author Amy Chua got us grinning, and talking up a storm. 

Her newest photo series, “With Banksy,” in which Julia portrays herself hanging in domestic settings with Banksy, the faceless (he covers up), in-your-face legendary street artist, is a cool example of her uniquely brainy-funny-edgy-naughty style.

“Banksy pulls off no small feat by being both the anonymous artist and the famous artist at the same time,” Julia says. “But by being anonymous, he is like the historical anonymous woman—‘Anonymous was a woman’—and anyone can appropriate his identity. Which is exactly what I did in With Banksy: I appropriated his hooded identity and placed him in my own scenarios. Why should famous white men have all the fun?”

As the co-founder and curator of the 100 Survivors project–a collaborative photo and video project for women currently in treatment for breast cancer or diagnosed in the past three years–Julia is currently working with Linked By Air in New York on the development of the website, 100survivors.org, a permanent monument and archive. The site is scheduled to go live in October.

Julia’s debut show at the Creative Alliance, in collaboration with writer David Beaudouin, in 2003, which explored the post-9/11 American psyche, was hailed by Glenn McNatt in The Baltimore Sun as “a stupendous achievement of minimalist, conceptual art that ought to forever lay to rest that such work is no more than a dry intellectual exercise.” Other shows include White Box, New York City, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, Los Angeles Art Association/Gallery 825, The LAB, San Francisco, Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, DC, The Metro Gallery, Station North, Maryland Art Place, Biblioteca Nacional de la República Argentina, Buenos Aires, Zentralbibliothek Zürich, and Aguilar Branch of the New York Public Library, New York City. She lives in Baltimore with her husband and three children.

Look for Julia’s first gallery sampling on our website July 1st–see Media Gallery, and enjoy.