Artist Statement

If I Ever Was a Child is an exhibition by our family of artists: Jessica Smolinski, Joseph Smolinski, Leo Smolinski, and Olive Smolinski. The show also incorporates work by some of our extended relatives — Betty Schwind, Edith Houghton, Charles Dollens, and Morris Scott Dollens — whose artistic lives helped set our creative practice and this exhibition in motion. Our artwork has long existed in conversation with one another and with those who came before us, but this is the first time we’ve participated in a formal, multi-generational exhibition.

If I Ever Was a Child is the title of a song by Wilco, a band whose music is often on rotation in our home and backyard studio. The phrase conveys a longing for childhood and points to the influences we carry into adulthood. In our family, influence moves in overlapping concentric circles, reverberating forward and backward — from family history into the present texture of everyday life. The objects we make carry these traces, sometimes overtly, sometimes barely visible, but always with a connecting thread.

For millennia, artmaking has been passed from generation to generation, from family to family, from parent to child. When we make art, we feel connected to those who came before us in a way that storytelling alone cannot provide. There is something uncanny in encountering the same formal or material problem in a painting, a quilt, a mosaic, or a photograph that our grandparents or great-aunts and uncles once faced, and simultaneously seeing those expressions in our children’s artwork.

As our children move forward on their own paths, they carry both what they’ve inherited and what they create for themselves, connecting the past and the future through art.