Biography
Polina Smutko is a Santa Fe-based installation and assemblage artist whose work operates in the visceral, post-minimalist tradition. Following a career spanning over three decades in art museums—culminating as the Director of Collections at the Museum of International Folk Art in 2020—Smutko leverages her deep understanding of how objects archive and dictate cultural narratives to construct physical testimonies of trauma.
Working with altered domestic furniture, raw elements like salt and charred wood, and the rigid infrastructure of electrical wiring, her installations are fiercely material and unapologetically dramatic. Influenced by Doris Salcedo and Joseph Beuys, Smutko’s practice rejects the notion of art as a vehicle for healing. Instead, her work serves as an abrasive, enduring witness to the pain of systemic marginalization and dehumanization. By weaponizing the domestic space against the rigid architecture of cisnormativity and the gender binary, she creates monuments to the friction of survival.
Statement
My practice as an installation and assemblage artist is a deeply personal, material testimony to the trans and nonbinary experience. Through the tactical use of altered objects and highly charged, tactile materials, I explore the trauma of systemic dehumanization. I construct these spaces to confront and dismantle the societal frameworks of normativity used to pathologize and objectify our bodies.
Identity lies at the very heart of our self-awareness and existence. Yet, we are forced to navigate what I define as a "transgender diaspora"—a relentless psycho-political dynamic that persistently seeks to demolish the rightfulness of our identities and evict us from the essence of our selves. My work is anchored in this friction. Influenced by the material gravity of Doris Salcedo, the structural critique of Joseph Beuys, and the raw power of David Wojnarowicz and Félix González-Torres, alongside the poetic defiance of Jean Genet, Lou Reed, and Patti Smith, my installations do not offer a neat resolution.
Instead, they weaponize the physical space. By turning the residue of trauma into tangible monuments, I challenge viewers to confront their own complicity in systems of oppression, creating an enduring record of our existence, resistance, and survival.