August 23 - October 4, 2025
Opening reception: September 6, 4-6pm
Inquires: info@craigkrullgallery.com
Pamela Smith Hudson’s Los Angeles is a fragmented metropolis, both literally and metaphorically. Through highly textural paintings and collagraph prints, Smith Hudson closely examines the genetic makeup of her city. Earth tones, particulate shapes, and disintegrating grids represent LA’s urban landscape, and surfaces are marked with grids and loops, each point of intersection or return an attempt at reconciling some paradox. Time is scrambled, and materiality is ambiguous—some paintings look like collages, and some prints look like paintings. Several prints appear as specters, faded ghosts of their predecessors, raising urgent questions about how histories are made and maintained. Many of these works, created during and after the Los Angeles wildfires and immigration raids and protests, might be seen as seismographic records of disaster. In a time of instability and erasure, this archive is essential.
Smith Hudson is an LA-based artist and educator with 20 years of experience in the art material industry. She has served as an art educator and consultant for some of the most innovative manufacturers across the globe, and is currently a teaching artist at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Known for her work with encaustic elements, Smith Hudson also experiments with other materials, including plaster, clay, graphite, and watercolor. She creates topographical works that chronicle her connections to the city of Los Angeles and concern for the land. Smith Hudson was the subject of a two-person show, Charting the Terrain, at the California African American Museum in 2018, and her works are included in the permanent collections at LACMA and CAAM. She has collaborated with the Broad Museum and the Getty Museum on educational videos about encaustic mixed-media processes.