Amanda Michelle Smith with her dog Emmy—companionship and creative energy folded into the fabric of home and studio life.

They are part ceramic, part painting; filled with girls, in fancy dresses, climbing trees and mountains in exotic landscapes; and there are monsters, lots of monsters, threatening or doing battle with the young ladies. In one work, a girl hefts a giant sword to slice open the gut of a beast swallowing her friends. In another, blood spurts out as a young warrior stabs a massive red dragon in the eye. Suggest that these female characters appear strong, however, and Amanda Michelle Smith will correct you. “They’re not strong,” she says. “They’re angry.”

So is Smith.

In Smith’s studio, on the bottom floor of her split-level home, a freestanding closet is festooned with family photos, political postcards, meme-worthy slogans, and irreverent affirmations of both exhaustion and defiance: One large one reads, “We’ll be less activist if you be less shit.” Smith sits on a daybed, her dog Emmy in her lap. From time to time she taps her hands or feet somewhat anxiously. Just outside the door, her two children, 14 and 10, are playing video games with a neighbor friend. “I don’t want to leave here,” she says, “but we might have to.”

“Here” is Utah, one of the country’s reddest states, and Smith’s politics run deep blue. It’s Provo, home to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ largest university, and Smith is “ex-mormon.” It’s a place the artist never aimed for, nor expected to end up in. And she has sometimes howled at it—in an Instagram post during the pandemic she wrote, “I need out of this state of wildfire smoke, theocracy, and anti-vax ‘patriots’”—but she’s made a home here. And now she’s afraid of losing it.

Smith’s studio cabinet, a visual manifesto of her artistic values—family, resistance, exhaustion, and humor coexist on every surface.

The artist’s materials—strategically chaotic and emotionally rich—offer a glimpse into the mental and material landscape of her creative process.

Smith grew up in Rust Belt Ohio, in a working-class, Scots-Irish family. “I remember living in communities where people actually took care of their houses, and then I remember my dad training people from other countries to take his job, and then his plant closed. And I remember the mass evacuation of industry from where I grew up,” she says. “And now you go there, and the only industry is drugs.”

As a kid, she became fixated on drawing with old green-and-white dot-matrix paper—“it was all I did, all I liked to do”—even though she didn’t think she was any good at it. And she had no plans to become an artist. “Nobody in my family ever went to college or grad school before me, and nobody was an artist,” she says.

A program in her high school allowed her to attend college classes for free. After graduation, she continued. She initially pursued psychology but took a ceramics elective at Bowling Green State University that changed everything. Taught by John Balistreri, who became a mentor, Smith found herself immersed in the world of clay, even meeting legendary ceramicists like Peter Voulkos. “I was just really smitten,” she recalls, especially after Voulkos, who passed away during a workshop, left behind boxes of underglaze that came Smith’s way. She was hooked. Despite setbacks—including blowing up her entire BFA show in a kiln two days before her exhibition—she remained fiercely committed.

Ceramic work plays a central role in her practice, even as in graduate school she turned her experiments in clay into a form of relief painting. Smith embraces the unpredictable nature of the medium. “I feel like every time I try something new with glazes I’m playing roulette,” she admits. “It’s something I love and hate about ceramics. You might be rewarded, or you might irretrievably ruin something you’ve spent hours working on, and you have very little control over how things actually end up.” For Smith, this process requires “a combination of surrender, detachment, and hope—a weird combination. You’re rolling the dice.”

When Smith was young, her mother joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and raised her girls in the faith. Smith participated, but by the time she was in college, she says she was done. With the theology, with the culture. But when she went to the Bay Area for grad school at San Jose State University, she recognized LDS congregations provide a welcoming community for transplants. While attending the local LDS ward, she received help finding a job and housing. And she met Casey Jex Smith.

Casey is a Utah native who studied at Brigham Young University before going to San Francisco Art Institute for his MFA. He is known for his intricate allegorical drawings rooted in fantasy, religious ritual, and role-playing game aesthetics. Art, Amanda says, is Casey’s mistress. But, still, he’s her favorite artist.

They married and launched themselves enthusiastically on their professional careers. Both exhibited extensively—in California, where they had grad school connections, as well as in New York, Virginia, Wisconsin, and France. When they began a family, California seemed too expensive, so they moved to Ohio. Casey taught at Bowling Green and then at a private school. But in a wave of layoffs in 2016, he lost his job. A sister-in-law suggested he try an internship at the cloud software company Domo in American Fork. It turned into a full-time position in user experience design and the family moved to Utah.

As much as she has bristled at its politics and turned her back on its religious culture, Smith says she is surprised by how much of a home she’s built in Utah. “I actually love it here, because of the people. When we were moving here, people said, ‘If you’re moving to Utah, don’t go to Provo.’ But the community of artists and ex-Mormons here … it’s just all kind of—everybody knows each other, it’s tight. Everybody’s so sweet.” As a lesbian friend from the LDS branch Smith grew up in put it: “Nothing reminds me of a bunch of lesbians getting together and talking about their trauma as an ex-Mormon community, because you can talk about trauma nobody else knows about.”

After moving to Utah, both Smiths continued to make art and to exhibit, even if less frequently than before and often times more outside of Utah than within. Amanda’s first major appearance on the Utah art scene came in 2020, when she exhibited at both the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and the Bountiful Davis Art Center.

Amanda Michelle Smith, “Women’s Lib,” 2019, ceramic and oil paint, 8 x 10 x 1 in.

Rouge: Utah Women’s Voices, curated by Nancy Andruk Olson at BDAC, featured the aforementioned bowel-opener. When she created it in May, 2019, Smith said it was “about the feminist struggle for equality, survival and basic human rights. It seems timely, considering the monumental steps backward we’ve taken just this week, with state legislators broadly banning abortion access and a woman’s right to make the most intimate and consequential decisions about her own body. It’s such a struggle not to spiral into hopelessness when the news is so heavy these days.”

Speaking of heavy news: 2020 was meant to be a time of promise for Smith, her reemergence as an artist. That fall, both her children would be in school full-time and she had plans for hours in the studio. Then came the pandemic. The children were home all day and Casey set up an office in the home. “ And it felt like a double insult,” she says. “The year before, 2019, both kids were diagnosed with autism. We got them diagnosed, and then a pandemic hit. So, I got knocked down, got back up, knocked down, got back up, and then I got knocked down and couldn’t get back up. And that’s when I quit making work for a while.”

Lots of artists with children feel conflicted, torn between their artistic drive (which can veer off a cliff into obsession) and their duty to their children. Compound that struggle with children who need more attention than most and you find the available hours become squeezed until there are only minutes left, and those often in the wee hours. “For Casey and I to do anything, to have a show or to make art, we have to lose sleep. We have to do it in 15 minute increments between requests—we have to fill up all the pill containers; we have to drive to Salt Lake for therapy … So in the end, it’s like, Okay, I’m [making art] strictly because I have to. Because my brain says that I have to do this.”

Smith blends LDS symbolism with Persian manuscript influences, capturing a robed figure on the threshold of disillusionment.

Smith is “back up,” with a solo exhibit at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. There are fewer monsters in Trust Issues but Smith is still wrestling with demons.

Smith isn’t always sure if her meaning comes through clearly, but the emotional charge of her symbols—both sacred and unsettling—infuses her work with a deeply personal reckoning. In one piece, there are no monsters, just a robed and veiled figure who approaches structure with a veiled entrance. It’s similar to many of her settings, which are often influenced by Persian and Mughal manuscript paintings. Those familiar with the Utah landscape will recognize the Salt Lake City temple, and those familiar with the LDS religion, the figure dressed in LDS temple clothes holding a Liahona, the symbolic compass from the Book of Mormon. Smith says it’s a work about disillusionment. “You are promised this exaltation,” she says of temple ceremonies and LDS theology. “You are promised that if you are endowed and you do all the things that you need to do, and you are worthy of personal revelation you are promised with bigger things. But once you get in that bigger door, it just leads to these very tiny lives, very provincial little villages where you’re like, ‘Oh, I never wanted to be here.’”

This work in Amanda Smith’s “Trust Issues” alludes to both personal trauma and a broader sense of spiritual coercion.

Another painting references her patriarchal blessing, a sacred ordinance that happens once in a Latter-day Saint’s life, usually in their late teen years. She describes it as something that felt like it “tied [her] feet,” limiting her ability to become her authentic self. She says of the ceremony, “People who are imbued with this priesthood”—referring to the adult male member of the church who pronounces the blessing and makes promises for the recipient’s future—“… They already know.” That sense of imposed divine authority overshadowed her own self-knowledge. Her imagery channels this experience into visual metaphor—”like this creepy thing coming out of a dead tree…to fuck up your life.”

Some of the few monsters to appear in this body of work are the gremlins who hops across a pink sea monster to storm a fortress made of pills holding one of Smith’s ubiquitous heroines. “I don’t think of myself as a typical mom who has it together and gets up and puts jeans and a sweater on and drinks a cup of coffee and gets their kids off to school,” Smith says. “I am a hot mess every day, all day, and so this piece, it’s not being critical at all of pharmaceuticals. It’s, like, I couldn’t live without them. But no matter how many pills you take—or if your dog is with you and you have a comfort animal (like my dog is with me), or you have a cup of coffee, and you’re in your safe place—It’s all still coming for you. There’s nothing that can keep it out.”

It should be mentioned: the monsters in Smith’s relief paintings are not particularly terrifying. They’re not meant to be. They’re intentionally campy, funny, even cute. “Horror is my favorite,” she says, but not because it scares her. In fact, she doesn’t believe horror—whether in film or art—can genuinely frighten. “The only thing that really scares the shit out of me is other humans.” Her monsters are more in the spirit of medieval bestiaries, with their strange, often laughable interpretations of animals: “You’re like, ‘Oh my God, that’s what they thought a giraffe looked like.’” Despite their whimsy, monsters still serve a purpose in her work—as stand-ins for threat or fear. “It’s the only way I know how to convey a threat… it’s a joke monster, but it’s still a monster.”

Detail from Amanda Michelle Smith’s “Pharma Fortress.”

New monsters keep invading Smith’s life: Just as she’s managed to get back to her art career, to balance it with her role as a mother; just as she’s found a welcome home with a group of like-minded friends, she fears a new political climate might drive her out of Utah.

“I’m very scared about the Department of Education, because I know for a fact, if they throw that back to the states, we will not have it”—“it” being the support necessary to raise her children, whether it’s the Individualized Education Program (IEP) that outlines a plan for a student with a disability to receive special education, or the long-term services her children will need throughout their adult life. Smith describes the state’s Social Security Disability Insurance system as “abysmal,” citing a social worker who admitted that even severely in-need individuals are routinely denied or left waiting for decades. “You won’t see a dime while your kid is a child,” the worker told her, noting that during the entire COVID pandemic, no applications were processed due to diverted funds. “Like this place is the most like Darwinian place I’ve ever lived,” Smith says.

She also worries about a world increasingly driven by artificial intelligence, where people deemed “undesirable” or lacking soft skills may be viewed as disposable. “Casey and I can hold our own… but our kids can’t,” she says. Her fear and her anger isn’t abstract; it’s rooted in the very real uncertainty of whether her children will be able to survive and thrive in a world that seems ever more hostile to difference. “The hardest part about having kids is the amount you love them,” she says. “Because – especially if you have kids with any kind of need, you don’t get to watch them move through life, meeting these milestones—like have really close friendships, all that —you get to watch them suffer, and it’s like torture. So, to us, it’s not about not loving our kids. It’s about it’s hard to have kids because you love them.”

Studio wall with Amanda Smith’s framed works, photos of her two children, and playful paper umbrella mobile—where personal narrative and visual storytelling intertwine.

Smith finds herself trapped in a painful contradiction—Utah is a place where she’s built a community and found things to love, but for her kids’ sake, she may have to leave. “You know, with every parent, it’s like your interest against theirs … and I will pick them every time. But at the same time, I’m sad about it.”

“So when you ask if I see myself here in the future, I don’t know,” she says. “But I doubt it…I am, like, in a state of constant grief and terror, and there are monsters all around.”

Trust Issues, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, through May 3.

All images courtesy of the author.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.